From Chicano therapy to globarriology: Chican@ popular culture and identity in late 20th and early 21st century Los Angeles

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FROM CHICANO THERAPY TO GLOBARRIOLOGY:
CHICAN@ POPULAR CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN LATE 20
TH
AND
EARLY 21
ST
CENTURY LOS ANGELES

By

Luís Carlos Rodríguez

____________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

December 2012

Copyright 2012 Luis Carlos Rodriguez
ii

DEDICATION

For my son, Teotl.
te adoro mas que todo…mexica tiahui mijo.
iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people I would like to thank. First of all, I would like to thank the
staff in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity their hard work and dedication
is remarkable and unmatched. A special thanks to Kitty Lai and Sonia Rodriguez for their
continued hard work in navigating me and my colleagues through this process.
This project had its genesis while I was working with a guerilla theatre troupe
comprised of committed student activists from southern California under the tutelage of
José Luís Valenzuela of the Latino Theater Company and Sleeping Giant Productions.
What I learned working as an artists and activist with this socially conscious group of
artistic friends and accomplices set me on course to ask questions about the relationship
between art and social movements, the relationship between art and identity, and the
relationship between the production and consumption of art. As an undergrad, I would like
to thank the many people who helped me both academically and personally. I was
fortunate to have many caring and passionate professors, advisors, and mentors along the
way. During my undergrad days at Fullerton City College I am indebted to Adela Lopez,
Gerald Padilla, Sergio Banda, and Nixson Borah all of whom are excellent educators in
fields ranging from ethnic studies to sociology to fine arts. They sparked interests in me as
a first generation college student and provided the encouragement (and the letters of
recommendation!) for attending a four year institution such as USC. As an undergrad at
USC I would like to thank Teresa McKenna and George Sánchez for sharing their
knowledge and expertise in American literature, history, culture, and politics and
especially for the encouragement to pursue an advanced degree while I was completing my
iv

undergraduate studies. Their courses were informative and vibrant and their work as
scholars was and is truly inspiring. In graduate school I was fortunate to have been granted
financial support in the form of a five year pre doctoral fellowship from the James Irvine
Foundation. The support of the Irvine foundation fellowship not only made it possible for
me to attend the program, it also provide me time I needed to focus on a full load of
coursework in those important first years of a doctoral program and provided the support
of faculty and professionalization throughout my tenure. I would also like to thank and
communicate my gratitude to Curtis Marez and Tara McPherson from the School of
Cinematic Arts and Josh Kun from The Annenberg School of Communication for making
the time to work with me during their busy schedules and for reading and commenting on
my work. I would also like to thank G. Alexander Moore from the Department of
Anthropology who has been a great educator to teach and work with and who made last
minute meetings and was generous with his time and comments on my work. I would also
like to thank my friends and colleagues in the Dornsife College of Letters Arts and
Sciences and the School of Cinematic Arts Department of Critical Studies in general. In
particular, I would like to thank my fellow colleagues and cohort in the Department of
American Studies and Ethnicity. Many of you have been there at various (and sometimes
odd) times to help with moral support and feedback.
A special thanks and appreciation goes out to my family and friends for their direct
and indirect support and especially for putting up with my absenteeism during birthdays,
holidays, weddings, and general celebrations because of the demands of coursework,
research, writing, and teaching throughout my tenure at USC. “estoy bien ocupado!”
became a distinguished catchphrase I coined for myself trying to desperately explain why
v

I failed to attend or rsvp family gatherings and special events. Mil gracias mi gente! I am
also thankful for becoming a father during my ABD days. At this time I would like to say
a very special thank you to my three-year-old son Teotl, or “Teo,” as I also call him. In his
own special way, Teo has blessed my life with his presence. Teo’s smile, his active
imagination, and his daily caring and generous nature, brings joy to all those that know
him, especially to his father who is a splitting image of him when he was that age. Mijo,
only you could make waking up to take care of you, with the smallest amount of sleep such
a joyful experience. You energize me on the daily. I love you very much!
vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures vii

Abstract ix

Introduction: Chicano Therapy 1

Chapter One: From Chicano Therapy to Glo(barrio)logy: Chican@ Cultural
Studies for the Twenty-first Century 27

Chapter Two: Aztlán in the Land of the Rising Sun: Boulevard Nights,
Lowriders, and the Consumption of Chicano Culture in Japan 90

Chapter Three: NonControversial Cinema?: Chicano Cinema, Sweatshops,
and Strategies of Resistance in Josefina Lopez’s and Patricia Cardoso’s Real
Women Have Curves 131

Chapter Four: Globarriology in Practice: “The Eastside Café,” Community, Identity,
and Chicano Activism in the 21st Century 167

Conclusion: Chicano Therapy in the 21
st
Century 214

Bibliography 220
vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: “Ixta” by Alma Lopez, ©1999. 52

Figure 2: "Our Lady," Alma Lopez ©1999. 52

Figure 3: Promotional Poster for Boulevard Nights
(Warner Bros., 1979). Writer’s Collection 100

Figure 4:. Image of Lane Nakano as “Sam” in the film Go For Broke
(MGM, 1951). The Associated Press “Lane Nakano, 80, a
Soldier Turned Actor,Is Dead” in The New York Times
(May 11, 2005) (web accessed 7/13/206). URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/movies/11nakano.html?_r=1 103

Figure 5: Still of Lane Nakano (left), Guy Gabaldón (center), Lyle Nakano
(right) on the set of Popular Television Show “This is Your Life”
(Ralph Edwards Productions, 1957). 109

Figures 6: Poster for the film Fukkatsu no hi or Virus (Haruki Kadokawa
Films, 1980).URL:
http://movyou.hp.infoseek.co.jp/kadokawa/kadokawa.html 110

Figures 7: Poster for the film Fukkatsu no hi or Virus (Haruki Kadokawa
Films, 1980).URL:
http://movyou.hp.infoseek.co.jp/kadokawa/kadokawa.html 110

Figure 8: “Car Hop Scene” Screen Shot from Boulevard Nights
(Warner Bros., 1979). 114

Figure 9: Picture of Raul Pacheco, of the Grammy Award winning musical
group Ozomatli leading a discussion at the first “Eastside Café”
event held on May 17
th
2002. Photo taken by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Used with permission from photographer. 183

Figure 10: Picture of Martha Gonzalez, lead vocalist for the musical group
Quetzal. This picture was taken during a Quetzal performance at
the first “Eastside Café” event held on May 17
th
2002.
Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. Used with permission
from photographer. 187

Figure 11: Picture of the spraycan mural "Comin 2 da Barrio. Culture 4
the Masses" Picture was taken at the first “Eastside Café” event.
Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. Used with permission. 192

viii

Figure 12: Flyer for the fourth “Eastside Café” event: “The Eastside
Café Four: The Descendents of the Earth”
Writer’s personal collection. 194

Figure 13: Registration poster for “Revolution and Resistance:
A Conference on the State of Chicana/o Art and
Activism.” Writer’s personal collection. 214

ix

ABSTRACT
This dissertation argues that for some Chicano and Chicana artists and activists living and
working in Los Angeles during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, what it
meant to “be” Chicano or Chicana was increasingly mediated by a globalized and more
inclusive conception of cultural identity that actively challenged and deliberately moved
away from previous and oftentimes nationalistic models. As such, some examples of the
cultural work produced by Chicanos and Chicanas, some of the Chicano discourse
surrounding their cultural productions, and Chicano politics in general suggests that
Chicano and Chicana artists and activists began to openly express a more inclusive and
globally mediated concept of cultural identity. As in the past, Chicano cultural productions
both responded to and were reflections of Chicano and Chicana perceptions of themselves
at home while simultaneously finding solidarity and influence from populations abroad.
This dissertation illustrate some novel approaches and examples Chicanos and Chicanas
were invested in projecting a revamped globalized Chicanismo outside the context of the
United States in an attempt to locate, reconcile, and assess what I see as instances of
Chicano globalizations. I examine the production and dissemination of films such as
Boulevard Nights (Warner Bros. 1979), Real Women Have Curves (HBO-Newmarket,
2002), the politics of the artist and activist collective “The Eastside Café,” and the music of
underground Los Angeles rock bands such as Aztlán Underground, Rage Against the
Machine, Quetzal, Slowrider, and the spoken word of Rocco from Mexico City’s Maldita
Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio. I put these texts in conversation with the work of
scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, the satiric work of the Theatre Troup Culture Clash, the
prose of Rubén Martinez, and the visual art of fine artists such as Mario Ibarra Jr., and
x

graffiti artists such as Nuke. This dissertation shows how Chicanos have been actively
engaging and collaborating with other groups outside the US through the production and
reception of popular culture. The circumstances surrounding these works also provides
examples of what I find to be, to borrow from George Lipsitz, “Chicano Moments of
Danger” that challenge both essentialized notions of Chicana and Chicano identity and
state-centered narratives of identity formation.
1

INTRODUCTION: CHICANO THERAPY
The seeds to my academic pursuits and for this dissertation were laid when I was
part of a Chicano student theater group based in Los Angeles during the mid 1990s.
Inspired by the work of El Teatro de la Esperanza and by the tradition of “Guerilla
Theater,” our theater troupe collectively created and performed artistic pieces under the
direction and mentorship of several notable artists including José Luís Valenzuela of the
Latino Theater Company and Sleeping Giant Productions and Eduardo Lopez Martinez of
Grupo Zero form Cuernavaca, México. We combined the artistic and political fervor of
the Chicano Civil Rights movement with the creative tactics developed by the San
Francisco Mime Troupe in the mid twentieth century. Incorporating salient current events
facing the Latino communities in the US and abroad, our performances were inspired by
newspaper headlines, and ethnographic and archival research; we workshopped our
performances amongst ourselves and with our peers and mentors, and we took them to the
streets. In carefully selected public areas, our “guerilla theater” was immediate,
ephemeral, and engaged people on the street, sometimes compelling the public/audience to
take notice of what we had to “say.” After our performances were complete, our group
carefully disappeared into the backdrop of the urban landscape. I learned much about
myself as a person, as an artist and of the relationship between art and politics during those
exciting days of inspiration and politicization. This experience would also drive me
forward in my academic pursuits. In particular, I would become interested in examining
the relationship between politics, popular culture, and identity. Our group had a phrase we
deployed to describe the negative attitude and/or the sometimes aggressive behavior by
some of our Mexican American or Chicano contemporaries who criticized our work as
2

“not being Chicano” as “not being Chicano-enough,” or of accusing our group as being
“white-washed,” or of claiming that our group was “selling out.” We described this
behavior as “Chicano Therapy.” And it would be this phrase which would both haunt and
motivate me to ask questions in an effort to better understand the relationship between the
production and consumption of popular culture and of Chicano popular culture and
identity, in particular.
Similar to how the influential and satirical comedic theater company Culture Clash
referred to Chicanos in their very Brechtian play A Bowl of Beings as “…confused and full
of rage,”
1
Chicanos or Chicanas that were in “Chicano Therapy” were said to be
reactionary, nationalistic, and were thought to display an angry, rhetorical, and behavioral
disposition which limited their scope of social consciousness, self-censored artistic
creativity, and ultimately stifled the path toward social justice and self determination. In
our formulation at the time, “Chicano Therapy” was not necessarily a negative social
disposition. Rather we understood it as a phase or stage of a Chicano or Chicana coming-
to-consciousness that was not necessarily a permanent sociopolitical setting but was rather
more of a means to an end. For this writer, “Chicano Therapy” is what sometimes
becomes necessary in order for Chicanos to attain what Bob Marley, in his twentieth
century anthem “Redemption Song,” described as “emancipation from mental slavery.”
2

Very much in the tradition of the Chicano Civil Rights movement, this Chicano
emancipation is a both a personal and a political transformation wrought from critical
education; education becoming an instrument for personal and collective liberation through
the development of an acute social awareness and the acquisition of a critical
3

consciousness, or what influential twentieth century Latin American educator and
liberation theologian Paulo Freire referred to as conscientização.
3

The first time I encountered the strange phrase was the spring of 1996. Our group
“Los Undocumented” had finished performing a one act play dealing with California
Proposition 209, the anti Affirmative Action proposition, and immigration reform at the
Dia de los Muertos exhibit and fund raiser at the world famous Self Help Graphics in
Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. As was our custom, we invited and entertained feedback
from fellow artists and the general audience after the performance. While the constructive
criticism to our work-in-progress was mostly positive in tone, some response drew the
group’s collective attention. A well respected fellow artist asked our group why we chose
to incorporate the use of the flag of the United States of America in our performance.
“That’s not our flag,” he boldly stated and others in attendance also agreed with his
declaration citing staple Chicano tropes of “Aztlán” and “stolen land.” This response
developed into a long discussion on Chicano art and identity politics as the group reflected
on how old varieties of Chicano nationalism seemed dated and indeed felt
counterproductive to the current struggle for equality and social justice. One of our troupe
members dismissed the critique of using the US flag by stating “Whether we like it or not,
we vote under that flag.” This was an example of “Chicano Therapy.” It was clear back
then that there was—and in many ways still is—an ongoing debate between Chicanos and
Chicanas about the ways in which we should respond artistically to the political climate,
what counted as “Chicano art,” what was “authentic” Chicano and what was and is
“Chicano-approved,” “Chicano-certified,” or “Aztlán-Select,” as one of my friends
recently jokingly stated.
4
In retrospect, this personal anecdote on “Chicano Therapy”
4

illustrates how some of the cultural fault lines between Chicano artists and activists were
also symptomatic of the larger societal debates on the viability of identity politics and
nationalist rhetoric in Chicano art and popular culture and questions the usefulness of
nationalism in our current struggle for self determination and social justice. As in the past,
identity politics would be an issue that divided Chicano and Chicana artists and activists as
well as how scholars write about Chicanos and Chicano culture and identity. This
dissertation addresses these concerns.
In American Studies in a Moment of Danger, George Lipsitz uses Senegalese singer
and guitarist Baaba Maal’s interpretation of midnight as a way to reflect on the current
state of American Studies scholarship and where he feels some of the discipline’s subjects
find themselves during our current moment of globalization and transnationalism: a
midnight hour where for a great many “despair reigns and a new dawn is very hard to
see.”
5
As Lipsitz explains, rather than viewing the midnight hour with trepidation or
dread, Maal sees midnight as an opportunity for “‘the spirit to [take] stock’” and “‘[look]
ahead to the new day…To know what you have done and what you have left to do.’”
6
For
this reason, Maal believes it important for everyone to have a midnight in their life. In this
personal philosophy of a popular recording artist, Lipsitz finds inspiration for the
development of a scholarly blueprint by utilizing Maal’s theory of midnight as a way to
delineate American Studies scholarship: where it has been, where it finds itself, and where
new scholarship should go.
Similar to how each successive social movement in the US was influenced by the
triumphs and defeats of previous social movements, each paradigm for American Studies
was formed by the triumphs and defeats of the previous era. While the academic contour
5

of the American Studies of the 1990s, for example, was influenced by the “Balanced
Budget Conservatism” of the 1980s and cold war politics, Lipsitz feels that our current
moment requires us to “take stock” of the ways in which the latter part of the twentieth
century saw the erosion of the isomorphism between culture and place due in part to the
“rapid movement across the globe of people, products, ideas, and images which
undermined foundational certainties about the meanings of local and national identities, the
value of personal and collective histories, and the solidity of social relationships and social
networks.”
7
Because of this shift, Lipsitz urges us to account for how our “actual
experiences in today’s post cold war, postindustrial, and postnationalist era confront us
constantly with cultural practices and political projects that cannot be pinned down to any
one place, that supersede the purview of individual states, and that generate a seeming
endless stream of new differences…”
8
According to Lipsitz, scholars interested in
fashioning an American Studies appropriate for this moment should be cognizant of what
should be retained and discarded from past scholarly directions, have an awareness of how
scholarship and social movements influence each other, consider how our contemporary
realities of globalization have “given new meaning to national and transnational
identities.”
9
As such, Lipsitz warns about looking at the US as the logical and inevitable
object of inquiry and instead calls for the development of what he terms the “’Other
American Studies’”: the organic grassroots theorizing about culture and power that has
informed cultural practice, social movements, and academic work for many years.’”
10

Lipsitz believes American Studies scholars would do well to embrace Maal’s theory of
midnight by “taking stock” of what we have done while at the same time envisioning what
we “have yet to do,” to critically audit our current social realities in order to bring relevant
6

scholarship to light. I am inspired both by Lipsitz’s utilization of Maal’s vision of
midnight and by his call for new and creative theorizing about culture and power.
In my own work that examines Chicano film, music, and literature, I consider
Lipsitz’s contention that we should have an awareness of how scholarship and social
movements influence each other in order for us to be keen to the ways in which our
contemporary realities of globalization have “given new meaning to national and
transnational identities” and can help us appreciate the Mexican American experience at
the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first. More specifically,
this framework can help us understand the ways in which Chicano popular culture has both
reflected and responded to the global midnight hour Lipsitz envisions, a moment of
struggle for Chicanos where foundational certainties about the meaning of being Chicano
and Chicana at the local and global level, the function of a collective Chicano experience
and identity, and the role of Chicano social networks have not only been undermined, but
also how Chicanos and Chicanas have attempted to resist and overcome the midnight hour
to bring in un nuevo amanecer.
Similar to the maxim “it is darkest just before dawn,” Maal’s paradigm also teaches
us that struggle, the midnight hour itself, can become instrumental in fostering the will to
overcome hardships; to attain the individual courage and spiritual strength necessary to
enact change. Like Maal, influential Philadelphian poet, singer/songwriter, and actor Jill
Scott understands that moments of struggle, can also be catalysts for change. In her song
“Sweet Justice” for example, Scott claims that “Struggle, Struggle, Struggle only makes a
man stronger / If he believes within his heart then he can find it / He will find it / Sweet
Justice”
11
Both Maal’s and Scott’s models of encountering and overcoming adversity, for
7

embracing dire moments and viewing struggle as a necessary component for change and
social justice, seem to recognize and agree with Lipsitz’s view that he late twentieth
century and early twenty-first century saw an exponential increase of people suffering
harsh realities under an ever-expanding global capitalism, of living in “a moment of
danger,” a midnight hour that for very many makes a new dawn difficult to see. These
insights from a Senegalese and a US popular recording artist are not only similar in
message, but both Maal and Scott also find common ground as critics of the globalized
world within which they produce their music and throughout which their music is
distributed. At the same time, both examples illustrate the lessons and the potential
functions of popular culture in struggles for social justice. As for most popular recording
artists, the medium of popular music for Maal and Scott, both of whom are of African
descent, is a method by which they express and communicate their individual and
collective realities, their struggles, hopes, and aspirations as artists, citizens, and producers
of popular culture. For both, of them, popular music becomes a medium through which
their respective messages can reach a mass global audience which in turn can open
possibilities for social action and political change. Popular culture, artistic expressions and
reflections of struggle and social justice have also been utilized by Mexican, Chicano, and
Chicana artists and activists in their particular efforts to makes sense of their respective
midnight hours and hopes for transformative political change.
Chicanos in a Moment of Danger
Popular culture has been a successful medium through which Chicanos and
Chicanas have been able to communicate important ideas, concerns over social justice,
freedom, as well as express their struggles with globalization. Like some of the works by
8

Chicano and Chicana artists and activists of previous generations, the generation of the late
twentieth century was also concerned with cultural identity but during a time, in Lipsitz’s
terms, when the isomorphism between culture and place has been disrupted by the rapid
movement across the globe of people, products, ideas, and images which undermine
foundational certainties about what it now means to be American, Mexican, Chicano, or
Chicana.
12
Influenced by the triumphs and defeats of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement
of the 1970s, more contemporary Chicano and Chicana artists and activists have continued
to creatively address their struggles for social justice. Through their respective art forms,
Chicano and Chicana artists and activists of this later generation utilized what Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak has referred to as a strategic essentialism in that they maintained some
of central tenets of the previous Chicano Movement while also moving toward a more
fluid concept of Chicano identity. This more contemporary paradigm, favored a more
inclusive concept of Chicano cultural identity over the sometimes essentialist, nationalistic,
and heteronormative model espoused by the earlier generations.
Invoking Maal’s theory of midnight, the inspirational words and manifesto of
Mexican rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN), the lyrics of Rocco, lead singer for the Mexico City punk/rock/ska band
La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del 5to Patio, the poetry of Gerardo “Border Gypsy”
Navarro and Richard Montoya of the US based comedy satirical theater troupe Culture
Clash, have articulated their individual and collective struggle with identity and social
justice due in part to the social realities symptomatic of larger processes of globalization.
Respectively, theses artists and activists are addressing what Arjun Appadurai called the
“global now,” how the last forty years or so have seen a traumatic rupture in social
9

relations globally. Exemplifying Lipsitz’s contention that a characteristic of our current
era is a destabilization of the isomorphism between culture and place, the expressions here
also reflect an accounting for cultural identity that is not necessarily a holdover from past
ways of thinking as much as it is a Chicano "ideoscape" produced and that is sustained by
the global systems of the 21st century.
13

Al pueblo de México, a los pueblos y gobiernos del mundo:
Hermanos, nosotros nacimos de la noche, en ella vivimos, moriremos en ella,
Pero la luz será mañana para los màs, para todos aquellos qué hoy lloran la noche,
Para quien se les niega el día, para todos la luz, para todos todo…
14

Whatcha ese!
Ponte trucha!
Es la voz de los abuelos la que habla

Palabras canto
Palabras historia
Palabras memoria
Palabras raíz….

Ha resonado a travez del tiempo
Ollin, Cambio, Movimiento
La larga noche ha
Llegado a su fín…

…El retorno de lo sagrado lo hace ver claro
Que exsiste una Guerra contra la humanidad
Desigualdad
Injusticia
Rapaz
Boraz Neoliberal
Explotación global
La resistencia es mundial…
En sueños y en vigilia
el águila y el cóndor se encuentran,
y América despierta
continente,
consciente.
15

…There are nights…
Life is a stage for speed freaks
10

Performing random prank calls
Confessing slimy loneliness
Screaming in empty bus stops to the salvage of the twentieth-century.

There are nights…
Neons beat faintly in the western fog
As the flat lines of cardiograms
tag the city with silent horizons

Nights…..
Without blood or semen
whose abysmal margins of shadows leak
And then, only then,
From the seed of darkness
The sunlight blooms like a child’s laughter…

…Somewhere deep inside every Chicano
Is Your Mexican child just dying to come out.
16

On the second anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, Subcomandante
Marcos echoed Maal’s theory of midnight while he communicated an important message
to supporters of the rebellion near the Lacandón Jungle. On a video tape shown on a
generator-powered television set, Marcos eloquently told his supporters: “…we were born
in the night and in the night we live.. But the light will come in the morning for all the rest,
for all of those who today cry through the night, for those who are denied the day… For all
of them, the light...”
17
Like Maal, Marcos’s night is temporal and the struggle through the
night becomes necessary for the light to come for all the rest.
Rocco utilizes Caló, hybridized words popularized by Chicano youths during the
early twentieth-century in the American southwest, as well as popular discourse associated
with indigenous Mexican society to warn about and critique the contemporary situation
south of the US/Mexico border and across the globe: “Whatcha ese! Ponte trucha! / Es la
voz de los abuelos la que habla… / Ha resonado a travez del tiempo / Ollin, Cambio,
11

Movimiento… / …El retorno de lo sagrado lo hace ver claro / Que exsiste una Guerra
contra la humanidad / Desigualdad / Injusticia / Rapaz / Boraz Neoliberal / Explotación
global.”
18
Rocco also references Maal’s view of midnight, however he does so by
answering the bleak scenario Marcos painted about the struggles of the young rebellion
when “hopelessness [reigned] and…a new dawn [was] difficult to see.” According to
Rocco, the long night in which Marcos asserts they “were born in” and within which they
“live,” and “where [they’ll] die,” has ended: “la larga noche ha llegado a su fín.” He
suggests that the “light” Marcos assured EZLN members and supporters “will come in the
morning for all the rest,” has arrived in the form of a worldwide awakening, a new dawn of
“resistencia mundial,” of global resistance to a globalized oppression.
Like Marcos and Rocco, “Border Gypsy” and Richard Montoya also utilize the
midnight hour metaphor in their collaborative poetic piece “Spoken World,” the fifth track
on the 2002 Angelino Records release MexAmerica, a US/Mexican artistic collaboration
album which was produced by Rubén “Funkahuatl” Guevara and writer/artist Rubén
Martinez produced. To Montoya and “Border Gypsy,” the midnight hour becomes
dystopic and surreal; a time when we can expect to see “speed freaks…confessing slimy
loneliness” and “screaming in empty bus stops to the salvage of the twentieth-century…”
A time when neon lights “beating faintly in the western fog” become “flatlines of
cardiograms” that “tag the city with silent horizons…” Like Maal, this “seed of
darkness…without blood or semen” and “whose abysmal margins of shadows leak “
eventually gives way to sunlight, the light of the new day which “blooms like a child’s
laughter…” Invoking constructions of Chicano cultural identity as necessarily having
roots in Mexicaness or Mexican cultural nationalism at the very end of “Spoken Word” the
12

image of the sun blooming “like a child’s laughter” becomes the “Mexican child,” which
according to Montoya of Culture Clash, lives “deep inside every Chicano” and is “dying to
come out.”
19
These examples illustrate how the current generation of Chicano artists and
activists view themselves in similar and different ways from previous generations. These
examples also help illustrate how Chicano popular culture can function as a vital marker, a
signpost, or a moment of aperture which reflects and comments on the changing dynamics
of society. Examining Chicano popular culture helps make better sense of what the
abovementioned artists and activist communicate through their respective art forms. For
this writer, Maal, Scott, and the above mentioned artists teach that singing is fighting and
the “struggle only makes [us] stronger. / If [we] believe…[we] can find it. / Sweet justice.”
It is because of this reason that popular is an important category for scholarly analysis
because it provides a vital marker of the changing shape of cultural identity.
20

This dissertation illustrates in part how progressive Mexican, Chicano, and Chicana
artists and activists utilized creative ways to express themselves during the late twentieth
and early twenty first century. For some artists and activists, the notion of midnight also
became a useful metaphor to describe their individual and collective moments of danger.
In what follows, I examine selected forms of popular culture produced by Mexican,
Chicano, and Chicana artists and activists from Los Angeles during the late twentieth and
early twenty first century as well as other artists and collaborators involved in the
production and consumption of Chicano popular culture. I contend that for many of these
artists, their individual and collective moments of danger became a catalyst for articulating
an individual and collective Chicano and Chicana cultural identity pertinent to their time.

13

…Standin' with the fury that they had in '66
And like E-Double I'm mad
Still knee-deep in the system's shit

Hoover, he was a body remover
I'll give ya a dose
But it can never come close
To the rage built up inside of me
Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy…

Networks at work, keepin' people calm
You know they went after King
When he spoke out on Vietnam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot…

Networks at work, keepin' people calm
Ya know they murdered X
And tried to blame it on Islam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot…
21

Palestine
You know your struggle is mine
And all those whose lands have been stolen
And the people disenfranchised…

Palestine
You know that your struggle is mine
Because your/our blood spilled is considered
Less worthy than those in power
i.e. Zionists/white supremacists/imperialists…

But the underdogs still exist
And our struggle continues to exist!
From Tenochtitlán, Wounded Knee, El Salvador, Panama, Chiapas,
Our children slaughtered as are yours

As native people of this continent to the native people of Palestine
Your struggle is mine!!
22

14

George Lipsitz reminds us that although our educational institutions have trained most of
us to think largely in terms of national politics, national histories, and national cultures,
while the “rapid movement across the globe of people, products, ideas, and images seems
to undermine foundational certainties about the meaning of local and national
identities…”
23
Thus, the present moment of global, social, and cultural transformation
“requires us to develop a transnational, postnational, as well as national ways of
knowing.”
24
Recent Chicano cultural studies scholarship has shown the multidimensional
nature of Chicano and Chicana subjectivities and how their social realities in the late
twentieth century have fostered unique forms of Chicano and Chicana cultural productions
and cultural frameworks that expand the contours of a geopolitical and geocultural space.
25

At the same time, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian has noted that because newer forms of
Chicano popular music and culture express more of an inclusivity of the Americas, and
because they question the very notion of an essentialized Chicano or Chicana “identity”
while also claiming a larger global stage, Chicano pop in the latter part of the 20th century
must be read against an earlier nationalistic viewpoint that tempered an importance for a
specific Chicano community. Also, as noted by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez
in their Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano cultural studies in the 21st Century,
newer forms of Chicano popular music and culture which seem more inclusive of alternate
worldviews are seen by some Chicano and Chicana subjects invested in ethnic nationalism
as encroaching on an authentic, originary, traditional “Mexican” or “Chicano/a” culture.
26

The music and lyrics of Chicano rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Aztlán
Underground, the performers and composers of the lyrics above, provide an useful
example which illustrates how concerns over Chicano culture and identity have been
15

addressed by Chicano artists at the end of the twentieth century Los Angeles. The
suggestion that older varieties of Chicano cultural nationalism—which scholars such as
Ignacio Garcia have shown influenced the development of a Chicano ethos—have been
exhausted is illustrated by Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics in the 1992 Rage Against the Machine
single “Wake Up!” from their eponymous titled debut album. In “Wake Up!” de la Rocha
refers to the draconian deportations of both documented and undocumented Mexican
immigrants and Mexican Americans during the United States’ Great Depression of the
1930s. The line, “Hoover, he was a body remover” directly refers to J. Edgar Hoover’s
campaign to deport Mexicans and “Mexican-looking” American citizens from the western
part of the US during a time of economic crisis in a misguided effort to protect American
jobs. Understanding the scapegoating and deportation of Mexican and Mexican American
men, women, and children as an example of American social injustice, de la Rocha
emphatically states: “I'll give ya a dose/ But it can never come close/ To the rage built up
inside of me, Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy…” With this declaration, de la Rocha
not only creatively illustrates the anger and frustration felt by many Mexican and
American victims of past and ongoing the deportation raids, he also succeeds in describing
an image popularly depicted in many of the murals and poster art associated with the Black
power and Chicano Civil Rights movements: the proverbial raised fist in the air.
Additionally, de la Rocha places this example of social injustice within the historical and
social context of the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements by
directly referencing the political assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm
X, respectively. Thus, in this example de la Rocha understands Chicano struggles for
social justice and self determination as part of a larger collective struggle for social justice
16

by people of color in the United States. By placing Chicano struggles for self
determination within the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements de la
Rocha is drawing a parallel between different communities who were addressing common
problems. These communities, however, are necessarily located within the national
territory of the United States and within specific examples of “American” history.
De la Rocha’s lyrics bring to mind one of the more prominent Chicano Civil Rights
movements chants: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” Seeing Mexicans
and Mexican Americans as victims of US state violence, “Wake Up!” illustrates Mexican
Americans as not only the victims of US domestic and foreign policy but also as subjects
of the US nation state. In this sense, Chicanos are necessarily seen as subjects of the US,
which suggests an internal colonialist critique and the rhetoric of Chicano cultural
nationalism. Conversely, the lyrics of “Palestine” by Aztlán Underground suggest a
different critique and a shift in rhetoric more akin to Lipsitz global midnight. The
composer of “Palestine,” Yaotl (Nahuatl for warrior), conceives of Chicano cultural
identity by traveling further back in time, while at the same time also gazing beyond the
US nation state. In Aztlán Underground’s 2005 unpublished song “Palestine,” Yaotl
compares the historical struggle of Chicanos and the indigenous peoples of the Americas
during the conquest and under colonialism, to the Palestinian struggles of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip in Israel and the Middle East. Whether in the Americas or the Middle East,
Yaotl sees common ground for “all those whose lands have been stolen” and suggests that
there are similarities between Zionists, white supremacists, and imperialists. Seeing the
local struggles of Chicanos and indigenous Americans for self determination in the same
plane as the external Palestinian struggles for social justice, Yaotl is able to conclude:
17

“From Tenochtitlan, Wounded Knee, El Salvador, Panama, Chiapas,/ Our children
slaughtered as are yours/ As native people of this continent to the native people of
Palestine/ Your struggle is mine!!” While de la Rocha’s lyrics dealt with subjects and
citizens of the US nation state, Yaotl expands the scope of solidarity to include subjects of
a different state in another part of the world: Palestinians living in Israel in the Middle
East. Additionally, Yaotl makes the claim that the history of Native Americans in the
Americas, and the situation that the Palestinians find themselves in today are similar in
scope.
As suggested by Laura Pulido and David Lloyd in their article “From la Frontera to
Gaza: Chicano-Palestinian Connections,” the view of Chicano-Palestinian solidarity
expressed by Yaotl and Aztlán Underground is one based on differentiated experiences of
oppression and struggle against universalizing systems of domination like imperialism,
global capitalism, or cultural imperialism, as opposed to solidarity and struggle based on a
notion of absolute identification.
27
For these Chicano and Chicana artists, it is not a
contradiction to view the struggle of other social groups in other parts of the world within
the lens of the Chicano struggle at the turn of the last century because the oppression
emanates from the same source. As Rocco stated: “…existe una Guerra contra la
humanidad / Desigualdad / Injusticia / Rapaz /Boraz / Neoliberal / Explotación global / La
resistencia es mundial…”
28
Compared to “Wake Up!,” “Palestine” seems to be moving
toward a more inclusive way of expressing Chicano solidarity and self determination; one
that is open to draw parallels between oppressed peoples outside of the US and the
Americas. The message in the lyrics of the above musical examples by two noteworthy
and influential Chicano artist-activists suggest that by the end of the twentieth century
18

some Chicanos began moving away from a southwestern US Aztlán-based separatist
cultural nationalism, toward a more supranational and inclusive version of Aztlán and a
more comparative vision of Chicano struggles for self determination and social justice. As
we shall see, this postnationalist view allows Aztlán Underground to identify with the
Palestinian struggle in Israel and perform with Basque musicians in Spain, it helps
illuminate why post WWII Japanese youths in Japan consume and participate in Mexican
American urban youth lowrider culture, contextualizes the musical group Quetzal’s
commitment to “Jarocho” music and culture and to Jarocho musicians in small towns
across the state of Veracruz, México and the United States, and this view also helps
explain the catalyst for the late twentieth century Chicano student activists involvement
with the Zapatista rebellion and continuing struggle in Chiapas, México.
For many Chicano and Chicana artists and activists living in Los Angeles during
the late twentieth century, being Chicano or Chicana was increasingly mediated by a
globalized conception of cultural identity. As such, some Chicanos and Chicanas in late
twentieth and early twenty-first century Los Angeles began to openly express a more
inclusive and globally mediated concept of cultural identity that deliberately challenged
and actively moved away from previous nationalistic models. To this end, Chicano
cultural productions both responded to and were a reflection of Mexican American
perceptions of themselves at home, while simultaneously being tuned-in, sympathetic to,
and also influenced by populations abroad. While some Chicanos seem invested in
projecting Chicanismo outside the context of the US, the historical record helps illustrate
why this is a novel approach; an exception rather than the rule. This dissertation is in part
an attempt to locate, reconcile, and assess these exceptions, these instances of Chicano
19

globalizations. I examine the production and dissemination of films such as Boulevard
Nights (Warner Bros. 1979), Real Women Have Curves (HBO Newmarket, 2002), the
politics of the artist and activist collective “The Eastside Café,” and the music of
underground Los Angeles rock bands such as Aztlán Underground, Quetzal, Slowrider,
and Rocco. With analysis of the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Culture Clash, Rubén Martinez,
and the visual art of Nuke, and Mario Ibarra Jr., this dissertation shows how Chicanos have
been actively engaging and collaborating with other groups outside the US through the
production and reception of popular culture. The circumstances surrounding these works
provides instances of Chicano and Chicana moments of danger that challenge both
essentialized notions of Chicana and Chicano identity and state-centered narratives of
identity formation. I argue that to better understand the experiences of Chicano artists and
activists working in late-twentieth century Los Angeles, requires a departure from
traditional narratives that rely on the nation-state and deploy instead a more global
perspective.
In chapter one, “From Chicano Therapy to Globarriology: Chicano Studies for the
Twenty First Century” I outline the four scholarly areas which have influenced my thought
process in examining Chicano popular culture: literary studies, Chicano studies,
globalization studies, and theories of race and gender. What I consider to be my “Chicano
Therapy,” this chapter puts into conversation the theoretical insights of scholars including
Arjun Appadurai, Raul Homero Villa, George Lipsitz, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, David Harvey,
Jose David Saldivar, Américo Paredes, and Gloria Anzaldúa with the theatrical
productions of Culture Clash, the travel writings Rubén Martinez, the spoken word of
Rocco of La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del 5to Patio, and the music of Quetzal.
20

Through this process I outline my theoretical approach in examining what I find to be a
Chicano critical response to the cultural impacts of globalization and transnationalism
through literature, film, and music. I develop a framework I call “globarriology” a hybrid
term that borrows from Arjun Appadurai’s and Raul Homero Villa’s notions of the “global
now” and “barriology,” respectively.
Chapter two, “Aztlán in the Land of the Rising Sun: Boulevard Nights, Lowriders,
and Chicano Culture in Japan” looks at the controversial American film Boulevard Nights
(Warner Bros., 1979), one of the most iconic and the very first mainstream American film
that deals with Mexican American urban youth culture as its central subject. In line with
scholarship that illuminates the complex interracial experience of ethnic minorities in
twentieth-century Los Angeles, the history surrounding the production of this Mexican
American themed film illuminates the Japanese American and Mexican American
experience in Boyle Heights during WWII and late 20th century Los Angeles and Nagoya,
Japan. An analysis of this independently produced American film and its reception in the
US and abroad helps illustrate how global popular cultural flows fostered economic and
cultural exchanges between Mexican America urban youths in Los Angeles and Japanese
youths in urban centers across Japan. Utilizing archival research, textual analysis, and
interviews, I argue that the cultural currency Boulevard Nights provided for Chicanos in
the US and their external Japanese counterparts, underscored how Chicanos/as in late
twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Los Angeles developed and embraced a
more inclusive concept of cultural identity that differed from previous nationalistic models.
In chapter three, “(Non)Controversial Cinema: Chicana Cinema, Sweatshops, and
Strategies of Resistance in Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves” I examine the
21

cinematic production and narrative of the independent HBO / Newmarket film adaptation
of Josefina Lopez’s award winning play by the same name. Utilizing archival research,
and textual analysis, I contend that this biographical film addresses the relationship
between gender and global capitalism vis-à-vis Chicana and Latina participation in the
global apparel industry. In this regard, Real Women Have Curves provides an opportune
text in which to study contemporary representations of working class Chicana and Latina
realities in global, immigrant, and Latino Los Angeles. Narrating in part how an ethnic
cohort of working class women interact working within the Los Angeles apparel industry,
Real Women Have Curves testifies to the ways in which citizen Chicanas and denizen
Latinas respond to everyday social realities associated with larger processes of
globalization. Real Women Have Curves also expands the borders of what is considered
Chicano Cinema by providing an example of cross-border and interracial collaborations in
the film’s production, as well as creatively representing how contemporary
Chicanas/Latinas negotiate and challenge the gender-based oppression sometimes found in
the post-Fordist economy. Real Women Have Curves both pays homage to, and provides
an example of, contemporary Chicana and Chicano artistic discourse that seeks to
problematize nationalism while empowering its female subjects. As such, this film is in
conversation with contemporary works by Chicano and Chicana poets, writers, musicians,
and visual artists who express a less exclusive construction of cultural identity that moves
away from gendered stereotypes.
Chapter four explores the politics and cultural productions of “The Eastside Café” a
collective of Los Angeles-based artists and activists founded at the turn of the twenty-first
century. A critical example of how constituents at the local level can be affected and
22

influenced by larger processes associated with globalization, “The Eastside Café”
illustrates what can happen when citizens and residents negotiate political and cultural
attachments to communities inside and outside the United States. Developed as a result of
political and artistic collaborations between Chicanos from Los Angeles and Mexicans
from the southern state of Chiapas during the mid 1990s, “The Eastside Café’s” rhetoric,
visual art, and public events, provide insight into how abstract concepts such as
neoliberalism and globalization resonate in the daily lives of its members. At the same
time, the cultural work produced by “The Eastside Café” members suggests that Chicanos
and Chicanas by the end of the twentieth-century began to forge a more inclusive concept
of cultural identity that deliberately challenged and actively moved away from earlier
essentialist and nationalistic models. Building on Villa’s concept of “barriology,” I argue
that the rhetoric, social activism, and cultural work produced by members of “The Eastside
Café” suggest a global turn of Chicano and Chicana cultural nationalism and social
consciousness.
Expressing some of the struggles with identity and politics at the end of the
twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, the closing chapter remarks on an
unplanned event that took place on February 6
th
2003, at the University of California,
Riverside’s three day conference entitled “Revolution and Resistance: A Conference on the
State of Chicana/o Art and Activism.” In a conference designed to “bring together noted
scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways art and activism are connected, and have
always functioned together in the culture,”
29
members of the UC Riverside’s Movimiento
Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (M.E.Ch.A.) interrupted the conference with a protest to the
conference itself, a demand for an autonomous department of Chicano Studies, and a rally
23

against what they felt was the university’s plan to incorporate an “Amerikkkan Studies”
model of ethnic studies.
30
Viewing it as an example of “Chicano Therapy” I argue that it is
also a representation of symptomatic of a Chicano “Moment of Danger,” as Lipsitz might
say, but this forced conversation the members of the UC Riverside’s M.E.Ch.A. opened is
also a disciplinary moment of aperture that informs us of the shifting nature of the
university in our current era of neoliberalism and globalization and the reduction of its
public and critical role. In spite of the frustrations and disillusionment many felt over the
2000 presidential election and the attack on civil liberties in the political aftermath of the
attacks of September 11 a year later, Chicanos in the midnight hour continued to struggle
with issues of identity and politics at the same time that this social group sustained intimate
networks with artists, activists, dignitaries, and anti-establishment groups south of the
border and across the globe. The global and transnational ties they developed in the late
twentieth century and early twenty-first century would be reflected in their artistic
expressions but would also serve to illustrate the fluidity of Chicano culture and give rise
to tensions surrounding the role of Aztlán as an ideology for resistance.
24

ENDNOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1
Culture Clash, Bowl of Beings: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy, (Theatre
Communications Group, 1997)

2
See “Redemption Song” in Bob Marley & The Wailers, Legend: The best of Bob Marley
& The Wailers (Polygram, 1990).

3
Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum Publishing Company, 1993).

4
From conversation I had with Lalo Licon winter of 2011.

5
As quoted in George Lipsitz American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of
Minnesota Press, 2001) p. 3.

6
Ibid., p. 3

7
Ibid., p. 3

8
Ibid., p. 4.

9
Ibid., p. xvi.

10
Ibid., p. 27

11
See Jill Scott “Sweet Justice” in Experience: Jill Scott (Hidden Beach Records, 2001).

12
George Lipsitz American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota
Press, 2001) p. 27.

13
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) p. 33.

14
Michael Parfit. “Chiapas: Rough Road to Reality” in National Geographic: Emerging
Mexico Special Issue Vol. 190, No. 2 (August, 1996) p. 128.

15
Slowrider/Maldita Vecindad. “Mexica Xicano Connexion” in MexAmérica (Angelino
Records 2001)

16
See “Spoken World” by Border Gypsy and Richard Montoya the fifth track in
MexAmérica (Angelino Records 2001) a compilation CD produced by Rubén
“Funkahuatl” Guevara and Rubén Martinez.

17
Michael Parfit. “Chiapas: Rough Road to Reality” in National Geographic: Emerging
Mexico Special Issue Vol. 190, No. 2 (August, 1996) p. 128.
25

18
“Mexica Xicano Connexion” by Slowrider, Rocco, et al. the seventh track in
MexAmérica (Angelino Records 2001) a compilation CD produced by Rubén
“Funkahuatl” Guevara and Rubén Martinez.

19
“Spoken World” by Border Gypsy and Richard Montoya the fifth track in MexAmérica
(Angelino Records 2001) a compilation CD produced by Rubén “Funkahuatl” Guevara and
Rubén Martinez.

20
See for example Victor Hugo Viesca, “Straight Out of the Barrio: Ozomatli and the
Importance of Place in the Formation of Chicano Popular Culture” Cultural Values 4, no.4
(October, 2000) p. 445-73.; George Lipsitz George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads:
Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place, (London: Verso, 1994)p. 3-5.

21
Rage Against the Machine “Wake Up!” in Rage Against the Machine (1992).

22
Aztlán Underground Lyrics to the unpublished song “Palestine” used with permission
from Yaotl Mazahua

23
George Lipsitz American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota
Press, 2001) p. 3

24
George Lipsitz American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota
Press, 2001) p. 4

25
See Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez Decolonial voices: Chicana and Chicano
cultural studies in the 21st Century Indiana University Press, 2002.

26
Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez Decolonial voices: Chicana and Chicano
cultural studies in the 21st Century Indiana University Press, 2002.

27
Laura Pulido and David Lloyd “From la Frontera to Gaza: Chicano-Palestinian
Connections”
American Quarterly Volume 62, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 792.

28
Slowrider / Maldita Vecindad. “Mexica Xicano Connexion” in MexAmérica (Angelino
Records 2001).
Notes to Conclusion

29
“UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society Hosts Chicano Art and Activism
Conference Music, Film, Theater, Readings and Lectures Scheduled Feb. 6 through 8” UC
Riverside Newsroom (January 29, 2003) http://newsroom.ucr.edu/324 (web accessed
5/15/2005)

26

30
My notes from the event. See also Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands
Edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia (Indiana University Press,
forthcoming)

27

CHAPTER ONE: FROM CHICANO THERAPY TO GLOBARRIOLOGY:
CHICAN@ CULTURAL STUDIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

This chapter puts into conversation four scholarly areas which inform my
discussion of Chicano literature and popular culture. In what follows I use insights from
cultural studies, Chicano studies, popular culture and globalization studies, and theories of
race and gender to construct a frame through which to examine what I see as examples, or
instances, of Chicano and Chicana “moments of danger,” of Chicano popular culture and
identity during the latter part of the 20
th
and the beginning of the 21
st
century, during a time
of globalization. Beginning with an analysis of the Chicano and Chicana experience
within the context of postmodernism, I reexamine the work of the satirical theater troupe
Culture Clash, the travel writings of Ruben Martinez, the spoken word and music of Rocco
from the Mexican rock group La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del 5to Patio, the music of
Los Angeles rock group Quetzal and others. My examination of these artists and their
respective works through the theoretical lenses provided by David Harvey, Américo
Paredes, Jose David Saldívar, David Gutierrez, George Sánchez, Gloria Anzaldúa, and
George Lipsitz, helps illustrate how Chicanos and Chicanas critically responded to local
influences of globalization and transnationalism through literature and popular culture
during the late twentieth century. While the multiple texts I examine are grounded in their
respective fields, disciplines, or genres, most can also be considered contributions to the
fields of American studies or what I consider to be an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary
field of Chicana and Chicano cultural studies. Thus, my discussion of how the Chicana
and Chicano experience was written about and represented in popular culture by Mexican
Americans and others will also be a comment on issues of disciplinarity and what I find to
28

be better approaches to American studies, Chicano and Chicana studies, and cultural
studies scholarship. Following calls for postnationalist approaches to scholarship, such as
those posited by Lipsitz, I will espouse a disciplinary and methodological path a revised
field of Chicana and Chicano cultural studies can take.
Recent Chicano cultural studies scholarship such as Arturo J. Aldama’s and Naomi
H. Quiñonez’s edited volume Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in
the 21st Century and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader
have shown the multidimensional nature of Chicano and Chicana subjectivities and how
their social realities in the late twentieth century have fostered unique forms of Chicano
and Chicana cultural productions and cultural frameworks that expand the contours of a
geopolitical and geocultural space.
1
In an attempt to examine Chicana cultural productions
during a time which seems to illustrate David Harvey’s notion of "time-space
compression," this chapter outlines some of the theories and texts which have informed my
way of examining Chicano cultural productions within a global framework. As such, I am
interested in exploring the relationship between the Chicano and Chicana experience and
their respective cultural productions during an era of late capitalism or what popular
discourse refers to as globalization. Before I begin however, it would be important to
delineate how I am referring to two terms: globalization and “glo(barrio)logy.”
I will first begin with globalization. For my purposes, I am interested on how
globalization, over the last 40 years, has underscored the increasing economic, political,
and cultural interdependence between nation states, peoples, and commerce across national
and international boundaries. With regard to Mexico and US, a good example of the
29

cultural, political, and economic interdependence between these two nations can be seen
during the build up to the 2000 presidential races in both the United States and Mexico.

“Countryfried” Chente: A Mexican on a Global Stage
A few months after Vicente Fox, the Mexican presidential candidate of the Partido
de Acción Nacional (PAN) and former head of Coca Cola Mexico, began his campaign for
the Mexican presidency, his campaign moved to the streets of Los Angeles, California. As
Fox was courting documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US with
rallies, meetings, and stump speeches, one of the most famous Mexican recording artists of
all time confidently took the elaborate main stage at the 2000 Republican National
Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Before a crowd of hundreds of enthusiastic, cheering state delegates, Stetson-
waving cowboys, representatives, and thousands of confused Mexican and Chicano
television viewers, Vicente Fernandez, the preeminent, most popular, most successful
Mexican recording artist of all time and the unofficial ambassador of Mexican rural
ranchero culture, sang the strains of the beloved and timeless Mexican ballad “Cielito
Lindo” accompanied by a pre-recorded Mariachi musical track. The balloons fell and the
crowd roared with excitement, “Chente” smiled for the camera and for the thousands
watching on television from home or the office. To many Mexicans and Chicanos it may
have seemed ironic that Chente performed what can be considered an alternate Mexican
national anthem before a US political convention honoring a republican presidential
candidate that during his tenure as chief executive of Texas executed more inmates of
Mexican descent than any other governor in the country. Aside from being a capstone to
30

the Republican campaign of courting the Latino vote, this spectacle provides a moment of
aperture for discussing how popular culture can shed light on the increasing political,
economic, and cultural interdependence of nations at the end of the twentieth century.
In their important edited volume, The Global Transformation Reader: An
Introduction to the Globalization Debate, David Held and Anthony McGrew discuss the
merits of the various facets of what they refer to as “the great globalization debate.” Over
the last twenty years, they argue,
the phenomenon of globalization--whether real or illusory—has captured the public
imagination. During a time of profound and unsettling global change, in which
traditional ideologies and grand theories appear to offer little purchase on the
world, the idea has acquired the mantel of a new paradigm.
2

Although traceable to the nineteenth century in the language of trade and modernity, it was
not until the 1960s and early 1970s that the term “globalization” was first used. This time
of rapidly expanding political and economic interdependence, not surprisingly, also
generated reflection on the inadequacies of orthodox approaches to thinking about politics,
economics, and culture which presumed a strict separation between internal and external
affairs, the domestic and international arenas, and the local and the global.
3
It is this
scenario of political, economic, and cultural interdependence between nations, peoples,
politics, and cultures that the above example of a “country fried Chente” elucidates.
4

This writer is not interested in entering a ‘globalization debate’ on a theoretical or
semantic level, instead this writer is interested in the ways in which popular culture
provides an important window through which to understand the social, political, and every
day realities of Chicanos with our current era of globalization and transnationalism which
31

sees products, people, and ideas moving across the globe at an accelerated pace.
5
George
Lipsitz has commented, for example, that the “rapid movement across the globe of people,
products, ideas, and images seems to undermine foundational certainties about the meaning
of local and national identities, the value of personal and collective histories, and the
solidity of social relationships and social networks.”
6
What is important here then is how
the speed and fluidity associated with globalization seem to work against the sometime
taken for granted notions of national identity, collective histories, and social relationships.
As such, I am also interested in understanding the role of popular culture in maintaining
dominant power relations as well as presenting possibilities to challenge the increasing
inequality generated by an ever expanding and accelerating global capitalism.
7
This is not
to suppose a dichotomy between an all powerful west/first world/producer and/or a
passive/third world/consumer, but rather to see how popular culture at once transmits the
power of empire to shape and mediate visions of the world vis a vis pre-existing and
developing communications technologies, information infrastructures, and global networks
while simultaneously spreading cultural symbols and creating diasporic and global
communities which open up possibilities for solidarities within national and across
international boundaries.
8
By Looking at Chicano popular cultural forms in the late
twentieth--and early twenty-first century Los Angeles, we can see how Chicano popular
culture both reflects and responds to processes of globalization and how emergent forms of
Chicano popular culture build on and differ from the legacies of past forms. This project
underscores how changing social realities during the late twentieth century fostered unique
forms of Chicano and Chicana cultural productions. Understanding how changing social
realities fostered unique forms of Chicano and Chicana cultural productions requires a
32

theoretical framework to help navigate the changing contours of a geopolitical and
geocultural space.
9
I offer the term “globarriology” as a way to understand the ways in
which Chicanas and Chicanos in the latter half of the twentieth century Los Angeles
creatively reaffirmed their cultural identity by building upon previous manifestations of
Chicano politics and previous representations of Chicano identity. This term should be
understood as a linguistic hybridization of postnational and global theorist Arjun
Appadurai’s notion of the “global now” with Raul Homero Villa’s literary and
geographical notion of “barriology.”
Globarriology
In Modernity at Large Cultural Dimensions of Globalization Arjun Appadurai
provides a cultural perspective on the impact and political possibilities of globalization. In
line with a postnational perspective, Appadurai considers the subject as someone whose
identity is affected by the cultural instabilities and displacements provoked by
globalization. As such, he argues for moving away from what he calls the “political
architecture of modernization theory" provided by the nation-state and argues for a
postnational perspective. Admitting that globalization has been an ongoing process of
modern capitalism and thus not necessarily “new,” Appadurai concerns himself with what
he refers to as the “global now,” with the ways in which the last twenty years have affected
a drastic rupture in the pattern of social relations globally. Due to this rupture, he sees a
need for a new political and theoretical imagination to help make sense of the seemingly
omnipresent effects globalization exercises on people's lives. As such, Appadurai,
attempts to conceptualize the global from the perspective of the local in order to explore
the impact of globalization on “everyday worlds” and how the popular imagination might
33

be transformed within the context of a globally embedded everyday life.
10
In order to
accomplish this he draws on the spatial metaphor of landscapes to put forward a typology
of five "global cultural flows" that serve to anchor the "imagined world" of the new
postnational subject: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, and
financescapes.
Appadurai sees ethnoscapes as referring to the landscapes inhabited by human
groups constantly on the move such as immigrants, refugees, and tourists; mediascapes are
produced by what he calls the mass `mediatic' systems and products such as newspapers,
magazines, film, and the internet which disseminate information at a global level;
technoscapes to Appadurai refers to the landscapes dominated by the diffusion of both
mechanical and informational technologies around the world such as the internet;
ideoscapes refers to the landscape of political ideologies and imagery associated with a
particular state or social movement; and financescapes form the globalized nature of
economic relations created by the increasing flow of capital. Although Appadurai’s global
cultural flows are metaphorical, this researcher finds that his theoretical approach to
making sense of globalization and culture provides us with an important context under
which the social sciences and humanities can make interventions. Part of my aim in this
chapter is to put into conversation Chicano popular culture and Chicano literature with
globalization studies. To that end, Appadurai’s emphasis on metaphors and cultural
representations is useful in examining the overlapping connections between identity,
politics, and culture. In order to better appreciate and analyze the ways in which the
interconnections between identity, politics, and culture inform Chicano cultural
34

expressions however, also requires a theoretical framework for specifically analyzing
Chicano cultural productions.
Raul Homero Villa’s examination of the intersections between urbanism, identity,
and expressive practices within Chicano culture, Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban
Chicano Literature and Culture (2000), is a multi-sited approach to the study of past and
recent Chicano spatial practices. Barrio Logos functions as an academic blueprint
illustrating the possible ways in which Chicano scholars can begin to more fully appreciate
nascent Chicana and Chicano cultural expressions as spatial practices in the 21st century.
Focusing mostly on Chicano literary and artistic representations of Los Angeles, Villa
illustrates the ways in which Chicano social resistance has dialogically evolved in response
to conflicts over social space. Villa uncovers three repressive spatial practices, what he
refers to as “effects,” which he finds contributed to the production of Chicano social space
in Los Angeles: the landscape, law, and media effect. The landscape effect refers to the
“physical regulation and constitution of space via land decisions and the built environment,
the law effect refers to the social control of space via legal juridical and state apparatuses
as well as police authority, while the media effect represents the ideological control of
space via the interpellation of citizens, or how individuals are turned into subjects, through
educational and informational apparatuses. Characteristic of barrioization, what Villa
describes as “socially deforming spatial practices,” he contends that these repressive
territorial practices have been instrumental to the creation of the barrio. Conversely,
“Barriology,” a term he borrows from the 1960s Con Safos community magazine and artist
collective of East Los Angeles, is to Villa the emergent critical response to “barrioization.”
35

As such, Villa defines Barriology as a “culturally affirming spatial practice” enacted by
Chicanos to carve out a “near order within a far order.”
11

Villa argues that Chicano cultural productions in the post World War II period
developed forms of “discursive intervention by which Chicanos critiqued, with increasing
aesthetic sophistication, the instrumentality of dominant spatial practices in marginalizing
their communities.”
12
Villa’s thesis is important because it espouses a relationship
between localized Chicano cultural productions and larger sociopolitical and
sociohistorical contexts. It is the examination of these Chicano and Chicana texts that
Villa feels helps shed light on the evolving experience of this social group. His view
builds upon Edward Soja’s argument that, similar to history, is an important category in
the construction of the social world as well as George Lipsitz’s contention that popular
culture provides a vital marker for the changing dynamics of society.
13
Utilizing the
spatial theoretical insights of Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Fredric Jameson, Villa shows how
geography is not simply a theoretical topic; it is grounded in the everyday lived reality of
Chicanos. I appreciate Villa’s approach to research because it also exemplifies Chela
Sandoval’s notion that our work as Chicano scholars, activists, and cultural workers should
“demand…a new subjectivity, a political revision that denies any one ideology as a final
answer,” and that it should “posit a tactical subjectivity with the capacity to recenter [and
remap] depending upon the kinds of oppression to be confronted.
14
” The connection
between scholarship and activism that Villa and Sandoval propose inspire me. As my
tactical response to examining the Chicano experience and Chicano artistic expressions in
late twentieth century Los Angeles, I combine Appadurai’s and Villa’s theoretical
approach, the “global now” and “barriology,” respectively, to produce “globarriology,” a
36

term I define as a globalized Chicana and Chicano “culturally affirming social practice”
defined by and resistant to the “socially deforming practices” of globalization. This
theoretical framework will help us understand how some Chicano cinematic, literary,
musical, and artistic expressions can be seen as responses to the political, economic, and
cultural conditions of globalization during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
Los Angeles. Additionally, I find that these expressions at first suggest a move away from
a nationalistic critique toward a critical response which grapples with identity during a
time of globalization.
Building on Villa’s concept of barriology—the discursive and artistic intervention
through which Chicanos respond to the marginalizing effects of the state’s power
structure—“globarriology” is a discursive and artistic intervention through which Chicano
and Chicana artists express and respond to the marginalizing effects of a global or
globalized power structure. As such, globarriological responses are artistic and discursive
acts which critique the state or local power structure, but also address larger global issues.
In this sense, globarriological critiques move away from the barriological responses Villa
wrote about and which seem to focus mostly at the state or local level. Employing a
globarriological perspective sheds light on the complexities of Chicana and Chicano
culture and elucidates how Chicana and Chicano cultural productions at the end of the
twentieth century articulate a response to the multiplicity of oppressions across race, class,
gender, sexuality, as well as nation, and perform a cultural mestizaje and hybridity in an
age of transnational globalization.
15

La raza!
Méjicano!
Español!
37

Latino!
Chicano!
Or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
…
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
…
My blood is pure.
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ…
16

There's the old avant-garde idea that you're better off if you rupture antecedent
traditions and forge something new…. it's a real negotiation between tradition and
change. There is rupture, but there is also continuity.
17

I don't think I make Chicano art. It's something I have learned as a history and
acquired as a filter. But right now, I don't think I could say I'm making it…I can't
go back and make that art. I make contemporary art that is filtered from a Mexican
American experience in Los Angeles…My drive is not to learn Nahuatl, but to
learn Mandarin or Cantonese.
18

Developing out of the political urgency of the Chicano civil rights movement of the late
1960s and 1970s, early examples of cultural work produced by Chicanos and Chicanas
ranged from poetry, graphic posters and banners inspired by the farmworkers' struggle and
by protests over social issues in cities throughout the Southwest, to theater productions at
migrant campsites and universities.
19
Art work produced by Chicanos developed into a
more refined body of work which was necessarily marked by Mexican American and
Mexican religious and cultural images such as La Virgen de Guadalupe, Day of the Dead
skeletons, pre-Columbian figures, and lowriders. As Josh Kun has noted, “Los Angeles--
by virtue of its role as one of Mexican America's most important capitals, and the sheer
number of artists working [there]-- became the center of the Chicano art universe.”
20

38

If we take a sample of contemporary and progressive Chicano art, literature, or
popular culture coming out of Los Angeles during the latter part of the twentieth century
and the beginning of new millennium, we see various examples of work by notable
Chicanos and Chicanas which seem to express a shift in cultural identity and politics. This
is not to suggest that Chicano art and politics is or ever was homogenous. Recent
scholarship has shown, for example, how some Chicano art and political influences were
internationalist from their inception. But the 1960s nationalist Chicano cultural paradigm
of a southwestern United States-based Aztlán and of the struggle for self determination of
a necessarily “bronze race,” or what Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales venerated as a brown
“…Raza! / Méjicano! / Español! / Latino! / Chicano! / Or whatever [we] call
[ourselves],”
21
seems to have given way to something different by the end of the twentieth
century. As the above quotes seem to suggest, late-twentieth century Chicano artists and
critics began to express a movement away from Gonzales’s interpretation of Chicanos
being the biological resolution of a racial and cultural dichotomy, the synthesis of contact
between indigenous Mesoamericans and Europeans: as Gonzalez suggests Chicano “pure
bloods” who were both “Aztec prince and Christian Christ,” toward a more inclusive or
less exclusive worldview of Chicanos, Chicano art, and Chicanismo as suggested by artist
Mario Ybarra Jr.. This movement away from the Chicano cultural nationalism of previous
generations, what veteran Chicano cultural critic, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, sees as a “rupture
of antecedent traditions,” as a result of a “real negotiation between tradition and change,”
is expressed by many newer generation Chicano artists including Wilmington, California-
based artist Ybarra Jr.
22
In 2005 he claimed that he "[doesn’t] make Chicano art” in the
“traditional” way, his work as an artist is not “Chicano,” per se, it is “filtered from a
39

Mexican American experience in Los Angeles" where his “drive is not to learn Nahuatl,
but to learn Mandarin or Cantonese.”
23
This view is different than Gonzales’ in that the
language important to Ybarra Jr.’s Chicano experience and identity is not Mesoamerican or
European in origin. Rather, it is Asian, not originally from Mexico or Tenochtitlán, but
from the Yellow River Valley. Ybarra’s Chicano outlook is different from what popular
Chicano discourse has offered before.
Kun commented on the continuity and change of Ybarra’s work as an artist and on
his political outlook:
Ybarra thinks of it as the Edward James Olmos theory of Chicano art. He wants to
be less like the actor in "American Me" and "Zoot Suit"--in which Olmos was
prison tough and pachuco savvy--and more like Olmos' character in "Blade
Runner." In the film's dystopian 2029 L.A. future, Olmos is Gaff--a digital urban
polyglot, a Chinese Chicano detective who speaks a street patois of English,
Spanish, French, Chinese, Hungarian and German.
24

The Los Angeles future described by Kun is Ybarra’s Mexican American present, a present
characterized by increased immigration, transnationalism, and globalization. Ybarra,
breaks with antecedent traditions and forges something new, he straddles tradition and
change in order to refashion a Chicano identity reflective of his present. This view of
moving away from limiting labels and embracing ambiguity and difference is similar to the
message in the band Ozomatli’s 2004 album “Embrace the Chaos,” and what Tomás
Ybarra-Frausto would see as rupture and continuity. Mario Ybarra Jr.’s example (or non-
example) of Chicano art and identity provides a useful starting point for discussing
Chicano popular culture and identify at the end of the twentieth century.
From Postmodernism to Transnationalism: Refiguring Chican@ Studies
40

I’m crazy, I’m a crazy motherfucker, I’m loco in the cabeza. I’m your postmodern
Mexican Hamburger Helper. Brothers and sisters run for the hills---have you heard
Madonna wants to play Frida Kahlo in a movie, man. I finally got myself a hero
and she is gonna fuck it all up for me... What the fuck are you looking at up there?
Haven’t you aver seen a multicultural nightmare coming unglued right before you
very eyes, man? Cause I’m Spanish, I’m Indian—American Indian, a “Dances
with Wolves” kind of Indian—ahooo!

I’m a walking talking grant writer’s dream baby…. [Whoa!] is that the LA Festival
in my pants or did I just cash my NEA check? Ignore the dents, ignore the critics,
they don’t understand my multiple personality multicultural ways. Hell, I don’t
understand them and I wrote this…during a commercial. I never read Kafka, I
never read Tolstoy, I don’t even know the words to “La Bamba”! I’m a Chicano
trapped inside the Beverly Center and I can’t get out!...
25

The typical postmodernist artefact is playful, self-ironizing…schizoid…it reacts to
the austere autonomy of high modernism by impudently embracing the language of
commerce and the commodity. Its stance toward cultural tradition is one of
irreverent pastiche, and its contrived depthlessness undermines all metaphysical
solemnities by brutal aesthetics of squalor and shock.
26

“To be Chicano [and Chicana] in effect is to be betwixt and between.”
27

From the above examples we can see how artist and scholars have associated the Chicano
experience with what Harvey calls a postmodern condition. In this sense, a Chicano
experience necessarily includes elements of pastiche, heterogeneity, a rejection of
tradition, and an embracing of ambiguity. Since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (1848) which officially ended the Mexican American War or the American
invasion of Mexico of the mid 19th century, the “condition” Harvey explains was also the
result of the increasing back and forth movement across the new US/Mexico border. In
Becoming Mexican American George J. Sánchez for example, finds that Mexican migrants
41

have been among the first to experience what scholars such as Harvey have referred to as
the “condition of postmodernity.” Sánchez finds that because Mexican migrants have
“moved between two countries—one industrialized and the other severely impoverished—
they have been among the first to experience what some have called the ‘postmodern
condition.’”
28
By realizing how Chicano culture can be instructive and provide insight to
the ways in which culture and ethnicity function in the post-industrial age, Sanchez notes
that scholars such as George E. Marcus have come to understand culture not as preexisting
in capitalist society but rather “‘how humans whose lives are structurally defined by
institutionally enacted capitalist principles respond to them in their everyday life and
experience’” (p. 9). Thus, the daily lives of Mexican Americans and ethnic Mexicans
inside the territory of the United States, the daily happenings on the US side of the two-
thousand mile long border which artificially and officially “separates” the US from
Mexico, becomes important. This historiographical context is vital to understanding the
Chicano experience as not only rooted in a history of conquest, in political, economic, and
cultural struggles for self determination, but also in the literal and figurative crossings of
borders. In this sense, Mexican migrants and Chicanos have also been among the first to
experience not only a postmodern experience, but also a “transnational” condition. As
David Gutierrez notes, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have worked to
“destabilize fixed and unitary notions of community, culture, nationality, and, indeed, of
the territorial ‘nation’ itself.”
29

42

With a [Pluma] in His Hand
One of the first scholars to explore and elaborate on a transnational Chicano
experience, although not necessarily in those specific terms, was Américo Paredes.
Although critics of Chicano literature have characterized Paredes' writing as "modernist,"
his writings are also expressive social documents and border dispatches that both
communicate and comment on sociopolitical and cultural issues transpiring on the
Texas/Mexico border. Because his work focuses on a tumultuous geography that
underwent tremendous change over time, for example, wars for independence and
annexation, social, economic, and political disenfranchisement of the population, and
explicit and implicit forms of oppression, and because the Texas/Mexico border region
continues to witness the mass movement of peoples between two countries “one
industrialized and the other severely impoverished,”
30
we can see how Paredes’ work helps
communicate the postmodern condition Sanchez wrote about as well as provided a
precursor to describing a transnational condition some scholars have more recently
described.
31

In Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), José David
Saldívar examines Paredes’ work and finds that his “modernist cultural work represents the
complex self-fashioning brought about by the bloody US/México borderland conflict…It
constitutes needed insights into the boundary disputes between and among academic
disciplines as well as geographic territories.”
32
Saldívar contends that Paredes’ work
simultaneously addresses issues between and in the US/México borderlands while it also
challenges what he finds to be rigid “border-patrolled” discursive boundaries. Recognizing
a similarity between the patrolled border between México and the United States and
43

“patrolled” academic disciplines, Saldívar believes that artist/scholars such as Paredes
challenge and cross both. Arguing that his “constant insistence on social relations,
connections, and complex affinities cross the border-patrolled boundaries between
discourses and cultures,” Saldívar concludes that Paredes’ use of modes of transculturation
is, in effect, employment of the literary and scholarly instruments given to him to
challenge the hegemonic mainstream.
33
This reading of Paredes’s work illustrates how
Paredes intervenes in the US’s annexation and conquest of the southwest thus providing
for us a view of the Mexican American experience ignored or overlooked by borderland
scholars of the time.
34
Although Paredes’ writings are not popularly understood as
“transnational” per se, his literary accounts of daily life on the Texas/Mexico Borderlands
offers a window through which readers can gain a nuanced understanding of how the
people living in what Mary Louise Pratt describes as a “contact zone,” or the "social spaces
where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly
asymmetrical relations of power,” have made sense of their lives during a time of rapid
social change.
35
The ways in which Paredes creatively and critically narrated the
sociopolitical contours of the US borderlands, however, was influenced in large part by his
experience outside the US nation state immediately after WWII.
In The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
(2006), Ramón Saldívar contends that Américo Paredes was more than the proto-Chicano
to which scholars have referred to him. To Saldívar, Paredes should also be recognized as
a precursor to the new American Cultural Studies because of his ability to notice the global
in the local, the ramifications of larger global processes in local spaces. To this aim,
Saldívar claims that Américo Paredes’s wartime writings for the Pacific Stars and Stripes
44

and for Mexico’s Mexico-City daily, El Universal, bear witness to his personal
transformation from a border subject with regional intuitions into a transnational citizen of
an emerging global system figured by the intersecting lines of power relations, North to
South and East to West.
36
In Japan, for example, Paredes witnessed and documented how
postwar Japanese society constructed narrative strategies to create continuities that masked
the historical disjunction of defeat and transcended the loss it had endured.
37
Saldívar
shows how these experiences manifested themselves in Paredes’s work, especially in his
celebrated With a Pistol in his Hand (1958). He shows for example how Paredes would
make the ironic parallel between the executions of Anglo-Texan prisoners by the Mexican
army under Santa Anna in Texas in 1836 and those of American prisoners by the Japanese
Army in the Pacific during World War II. Thus, through his persistent rearticulations of
the triangulated cultural and political relationships between North and South America and
their various and unexpected points of convergence in cold-war Asia, Paredes negotiated
the tension between the national and the global forces at work in the Americas, by measure
and by design. His experiences and knowledge of Latin America provided him with a
comparative perspective on the political, cultural, and social, dynamics of the various
forms of American nation states few other writers of his era shared.
38
Part of this was
facilitated by Paredes’ overlapping identities as a scholar of regional nationalist culture and
as a transnational journalist and writer. According to Saldívar, this experience taught him
to see the struggle for Mexican American social justice as part of a much larger and more
elaborate geopolitical struggle. Similar to the popular discourse on globalization and
neoliberalism which the Chicano and Chicana artists I examine here share, Paredes saw the
45

national culture or political event as a local inflection of a globalized phenomenon that can
only be understood according to a hemispheric dialectic of similarity and difference.
39

Following a similar path to Paredes literary scope of looking beyond the US /
Mexico border, Rubén Martínez has communicated his findings as a transnational cultural
sojourner. His writings not only chronicle his experiences crossing multiple national
borders, they also provide the reader with personal introspections on his positionality and
multiple subjectivities. Martínez provides us with what I consider to be postmodern
transnational scripts that simultaneously map and anchor his travel logs along different
geographies across the greater US southwest, into Mexico, El Salvador, and Cuba.
Martinez’s prose speaks to the idea that identity and culture transcend space, that the late
twentieth century, as Lipsitz, Appadurai, and others have argued, has “disrupted the
isomorphism of culture and place giving new meaning to national and transnational
identities.”
40
In his collection of essays The Other Side: Notes from new L.A., Mexico City
and Beyond (1993), Rubén Martínez comments on the complexities of his “betwixt and
between” positionality:
The 1960s are still etched into my memory, snapshots culled from the mass medias
collective conscience that appears alongside my recollection of the seventies and
the eighties...Mine is a generation that arrived too late for Che Guevara, but too
early for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Weaned on a blend of cultures, languages, and
ideologies...I have lived both in the north and the south,...trying to be South in the
South, North in the North, South in the North, North in the South.
41

Martínez accepts that his identity has as much to do with his shifting subject position as he
“moves from place to place,” as much as his existence at this given time in world history:
arriving “post-Che” and prior to the implosion of the Soviet Union. This literary
46

expression of Martinez’s Chicano subjectivity illustrates Harvey’s postmodern contention
of “privileging heterogeneity and difference as liberative forces in the redefinition of
cultural discourse.”
42
In addition, Martínez describes his identity in a global context
insisting, for example, that the Cold War influenced the development of his persona vis-à-
vis the “blend of cultures, languages, and ideologies” that demarcated the political,
economic, and cultural discourse of the US and the globe during the latter part of the
twentieth century.
43
Martinez’s postmodern and postnationalist epistemological and
ontological sensitivity is sonically illustrated in the musical and poetic anthology
MexAmerica which he co-produced with Rubén “Funkahuatl” Guevara, co founder of the
legendary Chicano musical group Ruben and the Jets.
A compilation of spoken word and musical encuentros with artists from both sides
of the US/Mexico border, the music compiled in MexAmerica (Angelino Records, 2001)
are barriological sonic expressions of globalization and transnationalism. The album is a
collaborative, bilingual album of original, alternative Latin rock from East L.A., Tijuana,
and Mexico City which features notable and influential artists from both sides of the
US/Mexico border such as, Rocco, front man of Mexico’s “Rock en Español,” band
Maldita Vecindad; Luis Güereña from the godfathers of Mexican “Punk en Español,”
Tijuana No!; Los Angeles’ Chicano underground bands Aztlán Underground and
Slowrider; Tijuana Nortec pioneers, Fussible; East L.A’s The Blues Experiment; Tijuana’s
pioneer punks, Mercado Negro; East L.A’s Los Illegals; Rubén “Funkahuatl” Martínez;
Claudia Morfín, from Tijuana’s Nona Delichas; Martha Gonzalez of East L.A’s band
Quetzal; Poncho Nakamura from Tijuana’s punksters, Mexican Jumpin’ Frijoles; Los
Anageles’ “Mexi-psycho-boogie” band, Calavera; spoken word artist from Tijuana,
47

Gerardo “Border Gypsy” Navarro; and Los Angeles comedian-poet, Richard Montoya, of
the comedy troupe “Culture Clash.” The hybridized linguistic name of this musical
collection, “MexAmerica,” linguistically questions the separation between the nation states
of Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos and the United States of America. This globarriological
reconfiguration of the two separate nations in the album’s title along with and the music
and lyrics expressed through the album in individual tracts, artistically express Gutiérrez’s
view that Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have worked to “destabilize fixed
and unitary notions of community, culture, nationality, and, indeed, of the territorial
‘nation’ itself.”
44
One of the Mexican artists featured in the album, Rocco, from México,
D.F. based band La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del 5to Patio, for example, composed the
following stanza to the track “Mexica Xicano Connexion”:
Whatcha ese!
Ponte trucha
Es la voz de los abuelos la que habla
Palabras canto
Palabras historia
Palabras memoria
Palabras raíz….
Ha resonado a travez del tiempo
Ollin, Cambio, Movimiento
La larga noche ha
Llegado a su fín.
…El retorno de lo sagrado lo ase ver claro
Que exsiste una Guerra contra la humanidad
Desigualdad
Injusticia
Rapaz
48

Boraz Neoliberal
Explotación global
La resistencia es mundial…
En sueños y en vigilia
el águila y el cóndor se encuentran,
y América despierta
continente,
consciente.
45

Rocco, lead singer for one of the most important and influential Mexican rock en Español
bands La Maldita Vecindad utilizes Caló, hybridized words popularized by Chicano
youths during the early twentieth-century in the American southwest, as well as imagery
from indigenous Mexican society to express and critique the contemporary situation south
of the US/Mexico border. Similar to how Paredes’ saw that the local is an inflection of
larger global processes, Rocco understand the contemporary situation for Mexican
nationals at home and abroad as being symptomatic of the oppressive state of global
affairs. As Rocco explains it: “hay una guerra contra la humanidad” and that there is
“[una] explotación global.” Although the situation Rocco describes is bleak, he
recognizes that “la resistencia es mundial,” that the resistance to this global war on
humanity is also global in nature.
46
As Kun has argued, rock en Español during the late
twentieth century and early twenty first century has become an effective sounding board
for the interconnected political and cultural fates of Chicanos and Mexicanos. Partly due
to the dramatic increase of rock en Español distributed and sold in the US and the increase
of rock en Español bands on both sides of the US/Mexico border, this popular musical
genre has functioned as “a traveling musical bridge between dispersed populations living
within the borderlands.”
47
Countering the walls that physically divide the US and Mexico,
49

this sonic bridge “creates a floating, migrating, musical utopia that maps new borderland
regions with coordinates like Mexico City/Los Angeles…”
48
The MexAmerica’s
introductory track is entitled “Breaking Down the Borders.” While possibly not succeeding
in dismantling the physical border, we can see how MexAmerica, provides a social bridge
that artistically expresses and connects the similar cultural and political, situations between
Chicanos and immigrants on the US side of the border with their Mexican and Latin
American counterparts.
Rocco’s assertion that antiglobalization resistance, or “resistencia mundial,”
necessarily responds to “explotación global,” or global oppression, is concurrent with
Curtis Marez’ view that warns us against privileging a central node of power in the global
cultural flows of popular culture. In “Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World
Revolution and the History of Hollywood Cinema” Marez comments on a better way to
explain US imperialism and the Hollywood dominance of cinema abroad. “Rather than
imagining cinematic power as originating from an imperial center that… imposes its will
on the rest of the world,” Marez contends, “we need to recall that historically, Hollywood
hegemony assumed its contemporary position of global dominance in response to forces
that opposed media enclosures.”
49
Both Rocco and Marez remind us that imperialism and
globalization also respond to anti-imperial resistance. This view is shared by cultural
studies approaches such as those illustrated by the Birmingham School which affords
consumers of popular culture agency in determining their role in shaping the meaning of
what they consume.
Through his music Rocco comments on issues affecting Chicanos and Mexicans on
both sides of the US/Mexico border. In so doing he also deliberately connects his lyrics to
50

contemporary anti neoliberal discourse by directly referring to the poetic words of
Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the
National Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN). Rocco not only references the words of the
charismatic Subcomandante, he also answers the bleak scenario Marcos once painted about
the struggles of the young rebellion. On the second anniversary of the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, for example, Michael Parfit from National Geographic described how
Subcomandante Marcos communicated an important message to supporters of the
rebellion. Appearing on a generator-powered television set via video tape, Marcos stated:
We were born in the night and in the night we live. And in the night we’ll die. But
the light will come in the morning for all the rest, for all of those who today cry
through the night, for those who are denied the day, for those whom death is a gift.
For all of them the light.
50

The long night in which Marcos says they “were born in” and where they “live,” and
“where [they’ll] die,” has ended for Rocco: “la larga noche ha llegado a su fín.” In
“Mexica Xicano Connexion” Rocco suggests that the light that Marcos assured his
followers “will come in the morning for all the rest,” has indeed come and that a new dawn
of “resistencia mundial” of global resistance has arrived. Thus, in this hybrid Chicano
Mexican crossborder cultural production, Rocco crosses linguistic, cultural, and musical
genre boundaries in his call for resistance to global oppression by—similar to how Corky
Gonzales’s argued in “Yo Soy Joaquin” in 1970—remembering the indigenous past that
both Chicanos and Mexicanos share. In “Mexica Xicano Conexion” then, Rocco sides
with scholars such as Arjun Appadurai who comment on how the contemporary issues
affecting individual nation states are symptomatic of larger global processes which affect
the world at large.
51

Rocco also answers the concerns of historians David Thelen, Samuel Truett and
Elliot Young over the problems of delineating the continuity and change of singular
nations and their call for looking beyond the nation while keeping the nation in focus by
looking at both the US and Mexico instead of just one or the other.
51
Rocco asserts “Ha
resonado a travez del tiempo, Ollin, Cambio, Movimiento.” Rocco sees the change over
time, or “a travez del tiempo, Ollin, Cambio, Movimiento…” resonating with both the US
and Mexico. He makes this assertion apparent with the symbolic meeting of the American
Condor and the Mexican eagle: “el águila y el cóndor se encuentran, y América despierta.
continente, consciente.” Similar to assertions from writers such as José Martí and political
leaders such Simón Bolivar, Rocco makes the important claim that America or “América”
transcends artificial borders. In this transborder or interconnected América the notion of
singular nations or the ideology of national borders is obsolete to the inhabitants of the
entire American continent. The meeting of “el águila y el condor,” thus, awakens a
“conscious continent” or a “continente, consciente,” a borderless continent. Rocco’s
individual positionality, of existing as Sánchez commented, “betwixt and between,” is
influenced by the identities he straddles: Mexica, Xicano, and a 21st century hemispheric
and global citizen.
Similar to Martinez’s and Rocco’s movements across borders and genres, the work
of visual artist Alma Lopez also suggests “Ollin, Cambio, Movimiento” but in the visual
arts. Her hybrid photographic art and images such as in “Ixta,” the restaging of the legend
of Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl on the US/Mexico border as a lesbian couple (see figure
1), and the restaging of the image of our Lady of Guadalupe in the controversial “Our
Lady” (see figure 2), illustrate a visual pastiche, a creative mixing of genres, visual images,
52

and artistic techniques while commenting on gender, sexuality, and religious iconography.
Lopez also deliberately crosses borders of sexuality and challenges heteronormalcy by
visually commenting on issues of race, gender, and US immigration policy in this restaging
of a paternalistic ancient Aztec myth.
52

53

54

(Figure 1, “Ixta” Alma Lopez, ©1999) (Figure 2,"Our Lady," Alma Lopez ©1999)

Two of the women featured and depicted in the two digital prints above are also artists in
their own right. At the time the image was created Cristina Serna was an educator, poet,
and activist from the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Later, Serna
would become part of the first cohort of doctoral students in the Chicano and Chicana
Ph.D. program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Raquel Salinas is a
performance artist and actor originally from Downey, California and a former member of
the influential pioneering Chicano theatre troupe El Teatro de la Esperanza. Both women
have contributed to the Chicano and Chicana movement. Both of these works and restage
traditional and iconic Mexican and Mexican American images by refashioning them with a
53

Chicana feminist cultural sensitivity and thus allowing for alternate readings of traditional
cultural texts. By restaging these iconic images with European, indigenous, colonial, and
heteronormative geneses, and by mixing traditional with contemporary iconography,
Lopez helps to destabilize essentialized notions of Mexican and Chicano folk art and
culture by presenting alternative interpretations and definitions. This blending and mixing
of genres and images has been a Chicano cultural practice noticeable in the latter part of
the twentieth century.
Yvette C. Doss, journalist, poet, and artist has written about Chicano culture and
music. She contributed an important article to the volume La Vida Latina en LA: Urban
Latino Cultures edited by Gustavo Leclerc, Raul Villa, and Michael J. Dear (1999). In
“The Underground Music Scene of Los(t) Angeles: Choosing Chicano in the 1990s,” Doss
found that the blending and mixing of cultural symbols is symptomatic of Chicano cultural
practices at the end of twentieth-century Los Angeles. Although it may seem that
incorporating traditional musical forms into modern punk, pop, and rock was “a viable
form of ‘cool,’ she argued that most musicians in the Chicano scene choose to take up
traditional instruments as a way to reject the sanitized, whitewashed modern rock
proliferating the airwaves rather than with an attempt to follow a Chicano trend.”
55
Doss
claims that for the many Chicanos in the underground music scene of Los Angeles,
“playing traditional and indigenous and Mexican instruments is a way of finding their roots
and connecting with a mestizo or indigenous past from which they feel cut off.”
56

Similarly, the scholarship of Victor Hugo Viesca, himself a Chicano native of southeast
Los Angeles, has shown how Chicanos have looked “to the past and the present for
cultural traditions and formations that they can use to construct their own political and
54

aesthetics practices.”
57
Similar to Los Angeles Chicanos of earlier generations, local and
international political developments, such as the passage of proposition 187 and the
Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico during the early 1990s, have functioned as political
and artistic catalysts for eastside Chicanos and Latinos.
58
Thus, historical, political, and
cultural factors have been involved in the development of bands with namesakes such as
Ollin, Quetzal, Ozomatli, Quinto Sol, and Aztlán Underground as well as musical
productions such as “Todos Somos Ramona” and album names Sociedad=Suciedad,
respectively.
59

In addition to contributing to the dialogical construction of a Chicana and Chicano
historical bloc however, members of thes underground Chicano music scene have not only
represented and voiced social concerns in their respective communities, but have also
participated in political and cultural exchanges with Mexican indigenous groups such as
the EZLN and their supporters in Chiapas, Mexico, Mexican musical groups such as
jarocho musicians in the eastern coastal Mexican state of Veracruz, and even with
musicians who identify with Basque separatists in Spain.
60
Thus, this desire to connect
with (or invent) their indigenous past by adopting Nahuatl names and by the localized
influence of domestic and international politics is also augmented by their attendance and
participation in international retreats with other social groups and artists. Here they also
participated in the dialogical construction of the historical bloc; the “bloc” in some cases
extending down the continent and across the Atlantic Ocean.
61

The use of memory, personal and collective, also becomes important for Chicana
and Chicano cultural identity. Martha Gonzales, lead singer for Quetzal, has pointed out:
55

There is an ancient pueblo verse that says ‘El pueblo que pierde su memoria pierde
su destino.’ Or, ‘If you lose your memory you lose your destiny.’ You need to
have a past in order to have a future. It’s very important to be responsible for who
you are and where you come from.
62

Gonzales makes an important justification for connecting with the past. Far from viewing
a indigenismo or Mexicaness as nostalgic or fixed, connecting with “roots” becomes a
practical way in which Chicanos can ground themselves in their everyday lives while in
the process of planning for the future. Echoing Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous words, “Yo soy
un puente tendido / del mundo gabacho al del mojado / lo pasado me estira pa’ ‘trás / y lo
presente pa’ ‘delante,”
63
Gonzales’ contemporary Chicana disposition recognizes the
importance of being “responsible for who you are and where you come from,” while also
being conscious of your subjective borderland positionality; an identity which finds
Chicanos and Latinos, such as Los Tigres del Norte have commented, “Ni aquí, ni allá. Ni
allá, ni aca”, and, as Lipsitz has commented, contemporary realities of globalization have
“disrupted the isomorphism of culture and place giving new meaning to national and
transnational identities.”
64

Although building on the traditions of past cultural and political practices, these
examples of late 20
th
Century Chicano popular culture illustrate how individuals’
experiences in today’s
post-industrial, postnationalist, and post-cold war era confront us constantly with
cultural practices and political projects that cannot be pinned down to any one
place, that supersede the purview of individual states, and that generate a seeming
endless stream of new differences that frustrate strategies for social justice based on
equivalence and interchangeability.
65

56

At the same time, these new spatial and social relations have important consequences for
knowledge. As Lipsitz finds, “new social relations create new social subjects who
inevitably create new epistemologies and new ontologies—new ways of knowing and new
ways of being.” In other words, “new social subjects produce new archives and new
imaginings.”
66
Because of this social reality, Lipsitz contends that “simple binary
oppositions between the local and the global or the particular and the universal no longer
seem useful [as] the isomorphism of place, culture, nation, and state can no longer be taken
for granted.” However, by “looking at the state as a transnational entity rather than as a
discreet and atomized national body,” Lipsitz contends that we can “learn that elites in
every nation have a stake in perpetuating differences among nations.”
67

Influential French / Spanish musician, composer, and singer José-Manuel Thomas
Arthur Chao or Manu Chao gives a lyrical shout out and wake up call to sojourners and
citizens worldwide when he asks: “¿Que horas son mi corazón?” in his songs “La
Primavera” and “Me Gustas Tu” from his second solo album Proxima Estacion: Esperenza
(2001). In “La Primavera” track five on Proxima Estacion Esperanza we hear Manu Chao
sing:

¿Que hora son en Inglaterra?
¿Que hora son en Gibraltar?
¿Que hora son allá en Fisterra?
[…]
¿Que hora son en el Japón?
¿Que hora son en Mozambique?
¿Que hora son en Washington?”

57

Afterward, on the sixth track “Me Gustas Tu,” we hear a sample of female and male radio
announcers from Radio Reloj (Clock Radio) or the local radio time service, announcing the
time of different states in the Americas.
Doce de la noche en La Habana, Cuba.
Once de noche in San Salvador, El Salvador.
Once de la noche en Managua Nicaragua…

To this writer, Chao’s creative use of language in two consecutive tracks located in the
center or middle of the album is meant not only to take a pause at the center of the listening
experience to merely ask what time it literally is. Rather, Chao is changing the tempo of
the music and the topic of his conversation by challenging his listeners worldwide, his
listeners fluent in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Arabic, Galician, and Portuguese as
himself, “What time is it?” “What’s happening?” “What’s going on?”
Similarly, Lipsitz feels that the emergence of new groups of social subjects in our
current era of globalization and transnationalism is a group with which scholars need to
start reckoning with in new ways.
68
“People who are displaced,” he suggests, “may not
know ‘their place’ but they may be precisely the people we need to help us discover what
time it is” or as Chao asks, “¿Que horas son?”
69
Lipsitz’s claim brings to mind Stuart
Hall’s contention that the construction of a counterpolitics to this global mass culture has
necessarily required "imaginary political re-identification, re-territorialization and re-
identification" with local "roots."
70
From a disciplinary point of view this is also important
when studying Mexican American and Latino culture in the US because doing so demands
scholars to consider the complexities of individuals multiple, shifting, and contingent
identifications resulting from global processes.
58

As John Carlos Rowe, George Lipsitz, José David Saldivar, Manuel Castells, Arjun
Appadurai, Stuart Hall, and Gloria Anzaldúa have suggested, in these times of accelerated
transnational and global flows of capital, people, and information, a more disciplinarily
integrated and comparative approach to the study of the territory Herbert Eugene Bolton
first referred to as "the borderlands" is needed. Indeed, Saldívar provides a useful
example in his synthesis of contemporary cultural theory in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
He sees the work of scholars such as Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, historians Vicki
Ruiz, George Sanchez, and Nestor Garcia Canclini for example, as exemplifying an
intercultural theoretical model which illustrates an understanding of both local processes
and global forces and that does not adhere to simple dichotomies such as the local and
global.
71
Saldívar argues that the various forms of domination of the cultural encounter
that took place on the borderlands also served to obscure “the important hybrid cultural
forms that workers from both sides of the border have produced."
72
As an example, he
discusses the legendary and internationally popular Norteño musical group Los Tigres del
Norte. He points out that "the same circuits of late capitalism that brought low wage jobs
to California also carried the band's norteño conjunto sound to Silicon Valley and
beyond."
73
His discussion of the group's undocumented migration to San José, California,
from the state of Sinaloa in the 1970s as well as one of their popular songs titled "Jaula de
Oro" (The Gilded Cage)
74
illustrates "the materially hybrid and often recalcitrant quality
of literary and [popular] cultural forms in the extended U.S.-Mexican borderlands."
75

Saldívar seems to agree with nascent Chicano musicians, writers, and artists who
suggest that the borderlands and much of the Americas are "contact zones" inhabited by a
variety of subjectivities and increasingly hybrid cultures. Echoing the words of Néstor
59

García Canclini, Saldívar claims that in order to learn from the dynamic exchange that
takes place across cultures, academics "need a transdisciplinary model more sensitive 'to
the opening of each discipline with the other."'
76
Saldívar has shown, for example, how
this view is expressed in the writings of Helena María Viramontes in her works, The Moths
and Other Stories (1995) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996), and in Rubén Martinez’ The
Other Side: Notes from new L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (1992).
77
This view however,
is also shared by and exemplified through the cultural productions of the anti-globalization
French-Spanish Manu Chao; Los Angeles’ Quetzal, Slowrider, and the Eastside Café;
Mexico City’s Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del 5to Patio; as well as the Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. Saldívar’s work provides us not only with insights on
the geographical borderlands of the American southwest, greater Mexico, and a México de
afuera, but he has also succeeded in providing us with a disciplinary roadmap that can aid
academic traversing across the intellectual borderlands which sometimes lie between and
within disciplines. Finding ways to engage with and traverse these cultural and
disciplinary borderlands is part of what this dissertation attempts to do.

“(His)Panic on the Streets of [Los Angeles]”: Finding Wiggle-Room in the
“Glamorous Glue” that binds Chicano Studies to the US.

In September of 2002, Steven Patrick Morrissey, former front man and member of the
legendary Manchester, England alternative rock band The Smiths shared the Arrowhead
Pond stage with Mexican rockers Jaguares in what Gustavo Arellano of the “Orange
County Weekly” dubbed “the biggest crossover attempt since Drake burned the Spanish
Armada.”
78
While the article suggests an unlikely love affair between mostly Mexican
60

American Latinos and the Irish English Morrissey, Arellano describes this connection from
a US centric point of view. To Arellano, the hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexicalian
Mexicans who crossed the US/Mexico border to attend the Yuma Convention Center in
order to listen to their favorite non-Mexican performer sing and repeat “Viva Mexico,”
appear only at the concert itself and disappeared once they left the building. Arellano’s
article provides an example of the difficulties some writers experience when talking about
Chicanos and Latinos utilizing the outdated and limited scope of the singular nation state.
Arellano’s article suggests that Mexican Morrissey fans exist only in the United States and
that Mexican and Chicano Morrissey fans are only consumers and not producers of
Morrissey.
While scholars have argued how there has been an increasing Latinization in the
production and consumption of popular culture in the US,
79
a reality which is further
suggested by Morrissey’s choice of attire at his concerts, his musical productions, and
when he confides to the mostly Latino crowds that he wishes “he was born Mexican,”
there has also been an ongoing, although little examined, Mexican Americanization of the
world as well. A recent film by Jim Mendiola, Speeder Kills (2002), for example,
commented on how one can visit the outdoor swap meet or tianguis “El Chopo” located
near “El Zócalo” in Mexico City on any given Saturday and find teenage Mexican punk
rockers contemplating and discussing Morrissey lyrics. The film also shows how if one
were to travel to Nagoya, Osaka, or Tokyo, Japan one may see Japanese youths driving
American made lowriders, listening to “Oldies,” dressing like cholos, and dancing to Rock
en Español at the local night club.
80
While Morrissey “became” Mexican only after
permanently relocating to Los Angeles, Japanese youths, to borrow Sánchez’s term with a
61

twist, are “Becoming Chicanos,” not having to visit Aztlán, not need to Japan. The same
global cultural flows that introduced Chicanos and Mexicans in Mexico to the Smiths in
the early 1980s was introducing Zap to Japanese youths in the late 1990s. In order to
better understand and reckon with what I call a “Countryfried Chente” or a “Chican@fied
Japanese Youth,” we must rethink not only the limiting theoretical models which privilege
or rely on the nation state, but we must also reconfigure paradigmatic constructs which
only move across nations uni-directionally. I think that a globarriological theoretical
approach can be a step in this direction.

Chicanos, Gender and Race: “Chupando Chavela”: Locating Agency in Critical
Theory

Reflecting on an article I read which dealt with one of my favorite Latin American
recording artists, Chavela Vargas,
81
I would like to open this portion of my argument with
an example of everyday contemporary rural and urban Mexican culture.
If one were to inquire, most Mexicans will acknowledge that when in a bar or
cantina and craving a generous serving of beer, an individual can tell the bartender: “dame
una Chavela” and, if there is no confusion in what was asked, the individual should receive
the largest serving of beer the bar has to offer, usually served in a tall and round chalice-
like glass and sometimes sprinkled with salt and chile. The “chavela” of this section refers
to Chavela Vargas, lesbian Costa Rican-Mexican recording artist and living legend. How
this tradition of synonymizing a large glass of beer with Vargas began is unknown to this
writer. Of interest however, is how this everyday cultural practice provides insight in to
62

the place Vargas holds in the Mexican popular cultural imaginary, how she is seen and
understood, represented and received, produced and consumed.
There are many accounts of Vargas, an unorthodox Mexican female singer and
interpreter of the mostly male Ranchero musical genre, showing up to and/or leaving gigs
“hasta las chanclas” (in a drunken stupor). Compared to other female singers/interpreters
she is usually exoticized and/or othered by record companies and consumers due to her
“unladylike” behavior and demeanor: “es muy diferente, exotica, bohemia…” Seen by most
as a homegrown Mexican,
82
Vargas’ Costa Rican nationality is also disavowed, something
uncommon within the nativist, nationalistic, and protectionist leanings of the Mexican
regional music recording industry.
83
In fact, for all of Vargas’ public self-positioning as a
lesbian and as a transplanted Costa Rican Mexican performer--for the specific ways in
which she affirms her sexuality through her performances and demeanor--she is more
quickly personified as an eccentric serving of a common (and feminized) Mexican
alcoholic beverage, cerveza, than a lesbian Costa Rican Mexicana with a Mexicano self
conceptualization.
This selective visibility/invisibility on the part of the producers and consumers of
Vargas’ música and personaje gives rise to important questions regarding visibility and
individual agency. As Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano shows, it is through Vargas’ exploitation
of invisibility, through the strategic ways in which she utilizes her lesbianess within the
masculine world of the Mexican Ranchera music genre, that she is able to “[create] a space
for lesbian readings within popular music,” that allows for alternative ways of individual
and collective participation in popular culture and thus undermines any essentialized
gendered subject position in popular music.
84
As such, this cultural vignette provides a
63

moment of aperture for discussing theories of race and gender and for analyzing the degree
to which different schools of knowledge have afforded subjects individual agency. Here I
trace some of the development of critical theory. The following examines the possibilities
for individual agency found within the epistemological frameworks of the Frankfurt
School and the Birmingham School, and feminist, cultural, and film studies that are
specifically relevant to my work.
The Frankfurt School (circa 1920s) moved forward from and responded to the
theories and methodologies emanating from the Enlightenment. The Frankfurt School’s
approach to scientific inquiry differed from the latter’s in its subscription to the idea that
scientists were not independent from their objects of study. Max Horkheimer believed, for
example, that the scientist, the object of study, and indeed the institution of science itself,
were products of social and historical change.
85
Thus, scientists and institutions were
interpreters and reproducers of the society and culture in which they lived and did not exist
independent of it.

This movement toward a more self-reflective approach to scientific
inquiry complicated and improved on Enlightenment epistemologies because it allowed the
researcher/scientist to place him/herself (during the first half of the twentieth century,
mostly “him”) into their work. Being critical of the historical and cultural development of
both the subject doing the studying and the object being studied, the Frankfurt School
recognized and allowed for some minimal agency.
By the 1930s most members of the Frankfurt School shelved ideas of working class
revolution in advanced capitalism. In their view, the working class “was as highly
integrated into capitalism as any other class” and thus all groups were equally subordinated
into the systems of government and industry.
86
While allowing for a symbolic universality
64

in the hopes of potential solidarity of the masses by placing all socioeconomic classes
beneath an ever advancing capitalism, this worldview was problematic because it
disallowed factoring day to day forms of oppression based on race, gender, and sexuality
between and within the classes. Because any form of agency had to function within the
rubric of the Frankfurt School’s race, gender, and sexuality-neutral understanding of social
oppression, their well-intentioned and politically progressive commitment to society was
betrayed through their limited scope of understanding the multiple ways in which different
agents exist and operate beneath and within the machinery of capitalism.
87
Additionally,
because the Frankfurt School relied on the lens of the nation state, individuals such as
sojourners and undocumented or non-citizens, individuals who shared the same space,
socioeconomic environment, societal pains, and similar hopes and aspirations, were left
out of the picture. Thus, the potential for “stateless” individuals to be included in any
schema of solidarity based on a nationalism defined by citizenship in a particular state was
diminished or unattainable. These individuals were excluded or worse, considered threats
to solidarities among members of social movements functioning within the political,
economic, and cultural confines of the nation state.
88
Cultural Studies would address some
of these issues and gaps.
According to Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies emerged out of a concern that, even
though the major cultural transformations in society were taking place in working class
culture, “traditional” disciplines failed to adequately address them.
89
The emergence of
Cultural Studies in the 1960s was also a result of larger societal and political shifts that
would help politicize academic work in the humanities and social sciences. Like the
Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School was multidisciplinary and drew from Marxism,
65

however, Cultural Studies also utilized insights from newer modes of inquiry such as
feminism and other disciplines developing during the late 1960s and 70s. Because of this,
some did not consider Cultural Studies a discipline, but rather an academic space where
disciplines intersected, a “cluster of disciplines” in the study of the cultural aspects of
society.
90
Similar to the aspirations of the Frankfurt School with regard to political and
societal change, Cultural Studies was consciously concerned with transforming the practice
of producing knowledge, by taking into account issues of cultural politics, and with asking
cultural and theoretical questions in relation to power. Along with Cultural Studies’
epistemological, methodological, and theoretical concerns of the 1970s and 1980s, much
of its work was solidly grounded in historical studies of English society.
91

Responding to the bleak scenario presented by the Frankfurt School which saw the
masses as passive, Cultural Studies offered a better scenario for agency. Differing from
the mass culture framework Theodore Adorno provided through “the Culture Industry,” for
example, Cultural Studies saw consumers of popular culture as active members in
producing, consuming, and alternatively interpreting popular culture.
92
Thus, Cultural
Studies allowed for more voices to be brought into discussions of culture in society. Its
analysis was not strictly top-down as the categories of race, class, and gender also became
important sites of and for critical analysis. Because Cultural Studies offers a more
democratic scientific inquiry, researchers and scientists could look at the liminal spaces
that were both created by and left out of scientific analysis by the Frankfurt School.
Although difficult to construct and effectively execute in a cultural studies project, it is
hoped that race, gender, sexuality and marginalized voices become not only recognizable
subject matter, but viable and important positionalities and sources of inquiry and analysis
66

in the humanities and social sciences. Early feminist scholarship would fill some of these
gaps, but also produce new ones.
The politics of the second wave of feminism not only continued to challenge
restrictive laws based on gender, it also began to address important issues related to
identity and culture. Characteristic of these goals to unveil and change unequal power
dynamics in society, scholarship explored the psychological and social mechanisms that
structured and maintained patriarchy. Two important figures were Simone de Beauvior
and Betty Friedan who published their groundbreaking works The Second Sex and The
Feminine Mystique, respectively.
Rejecting Freud’s sexual monism which privileged the masculine libido in
sexuality,
93
de Beauvior commented on the ways in which patriarchy utilized biological
differences in order to for a hierarchy of gender differences and social inequalities, thus,
her widely cited statement: “women are made not born.”
94
She made the important
contribution of distinguishing between biology and gender and suggesting that gender is
socially constructed. Comprehending gender in this way not only presented women and
men with the theoretical possibility of destabilizing the ascribed roles given to women in a
patriarchal society, it was also a useful analogy for understanding the nature of racism in
the US, although it was formed in the problematic black/white paradigm. Recognizing
gender as a social construct deployed to maintain a patriarchal order in society vis-à-vis the
exploitation of sexual differences, biological differences were also employed to justify and
maintain a white supremacist social order. De Beauvior’s contention that there was “no
women’s problem only a men’s problem,” she was also suggesting that there was no black
problem only a white problem.
95
Additionally, because this view suggested that patriarchy
67

and racism emanated from the same source, it anticipated later feminist work such as
scholarship by feminists of color, US third world feminists, and others who would help
develop, expand on, and reconfigure theories of race and gender to understand these
categories as being mutually constructed and constituted and thus should be seen as
equally important categories in social and critical analysis.
96

In The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan illustrated the stifling role of middle class
women in society, in particular full-time homemaker and housewife. In tune with
emerging scholarship in the humanities and social science of the time, she dealt with
questions of lifestyle and culture. Similar to de Beauvior, she considered the problem as
not sexual, but one of identity, what Freidan understood as “a stunting of [personal] growth
that [was] perpetuated by the feminine mystique." Given that her ideas were developed
during a time of US middle class economic prosperity and on the heels of repercussions
stemming from the large women’s workforce recruited during WWII, issues of personal
identity, lifestyle choices (or the lack thereof), Freidan intervened in the important realm of
culture. Because her insights exposed what many women in middle class America were
undergoing and feeling in their daily lives, The Feminine Mystique became a national
bestseller. Its success and popularity led Friedan toward academic positions and the
founding of the National Organization of Women, which would impact the feminist
movement and influence issues of public policy in progressive ways.
97

The insights of de Beauvior and Friedan notwithstanding, many women
participating within and on the margins of the feminist movement began to question its
politics and merits. Feminists of color for example, saw the feminist movement as a
middle-class and mostly white women’s movement within which they saw their voices
68

ignored, stifled, or worse silenced.
98
Seeing the feminist movement as largely interested in
locating “liberatory solution to personal dilemmas,” in Feminist Theory From Margin to
Center (1984) bell hooks critiques the Feminist Movement by calling out its hierarchal
structure.
99
As others before her, hooks took Friedan to task and criticized the feminist
movement for subscribing to a white, middle class, college educated women’s agenda that
privileged class while disavowing racism and for practicing a politics of inclusion to a
white, phallus-centric, individualist, capitalist society as opposed to its radical
transformation.
100
From personal experience, hooks also saw the feminist movement
ignoring, indeed silencing “other” women’s voices as well as ignoring the multiple ways in
which white feminist perspectives reflected race and class biases while at the same time
reinforcing white supremacy and hindering the possibility for unity across ethnic, class,
and racial boundaries. The “unacknowledged aspects of the social status of many white
women,” that they are “more privileged in a white supremacist state than the racialized
female other,” hooks claims, “prevents them from transcending racism and limits the scope
of their understanding of women’s overall social status” in the US. At the same time, by
projecting a mythical power and strength unto black women, “white women…promote a
false image of themselves as powerless passive victims and deflect attention away
from…their power…[and] their willingness to dominate and control others."
101

In an effort to alleviate this race and class categorical feminist impasse, hooks,
almost paradoxically, privileges the experiences of oppressed black women for the
reformation, continuance, and advancement of the larger feminist struggle. That is,
because she feels that a liberatory feminist theory and praxis should be a collective
responsibility it becomes essential for black women to
69

recognize the special vantage point [their] marginality [affords them] and make use
of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well
as to envision and create a counter-hegemony…We have a central role to play in
the making of feminist theory and a contribution to offer that is unique and
valuable.
102

hooks work, and what became characteristic of work produced by feminist and cultural
studies scholars, deploys a bottom up and margin-to-center approach to scholarship that
values the voices and experiences of marginalized women. Indeed, it was hook’s
experience of living under a patriarchal southern society and her introduction to feminism
at the university in the early 1970s, that led her to develop these views, from a critical
consciousness wrought through the combination of a social awareness of the day to day
environment under which she lived, and by her positionality as a marginalized female
college student. Attempting to dislodge feminist discourse from the ivory tower, she
argues that we include the “unofficial” not only into the discourse but into the praxis as
well. Thus, constructing theory from the center toward the margin, from the few to affect
the many, is not as beneficial as developing theory from the margins inward, from a
negotiation between the center and margins because the model includes the marginalized
into the conversation. Thus, hooks finds that a better feminism must include a wider range
of views: “feminism must become a mass based political movement if it is to have
revolutionary transformative impact on society.”
103

Similar to hooks and others, Chicanas and Latinas have also struggled to articulate
a Chicana feminism which acknowledges the similarities and differences with other
structures of social inequality such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. One of the most
important contributions to this task has been the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. In
70

Borderlands/la frontera the New Mestiza she develops a critical framework that not only
acknowledges differences in race, class, gender, and sexuality but also proposes the
multiple configurations those differences can take in hybrid forms. Her assertion that the
borderlands are not fixed in space and not particular to the southwest is an especially
important contribution to feminist, queer, Chicana, Chicano, gender, sexuality, and
borderland studies. As Anzaldúa states, the borderlands are ‘physically present wherever
two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same
territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between
two individuals shrinks…”
104
Anzaldúa situates the notion of the geographical borderlands,
conceived and theorized first by scholars such as Herbert Eugene Bolton, and articulated in
the scholarship of John Francis Bannon, Carey McWilliams, and Americo Paredes, on the
racialized female body.
105
And in so doing, she developed a new paradigm for
understanding individual subjectivities and positionalities.
To Anzaldúa, the overdetermined concept of the physical borderlands functions as
a paradigm for understanding what Mary Louise Pratt referred to as “contact zones,” the
ways in which “subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other…in terms of
co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically
asymmetrical relations of power."
106
In this sense, Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of
borderlands can be applied to many contexts, not all geographical and never fixed. As
Anzaldúa states in her preface:
...Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple
identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an "alien" element.
There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of
humankind, in being "worked" on. I have the sense that certain "faculties"-not just
71

in me but in every border resident, colored or non-colored-and dormant areas of
consciousness are being activated, awakened.”
107

Anzaldúa’s concept of a borderland consciousness is similar to the agency found in Cherrie
Moraga’s work. Namely, that there can be (and we must struggle for) unity vis a vis
difference.
108
In this sense, existing on the borderlands, regardless where an individual and
the borderlands may physically or geographically be, becomes a potential way in which
s/he may unite and resist. Similar to Moraga, Anzaldúa wants to bridge differences while
also being critical of her positionality and culture.
Though I'll defend my race and culture when they are attacked by non-mexicanos,
conosco el malestar de mi cultura. I abhor some of my culture's ways, how it
cripples its women, como burras, our strengths used against us, lowly burras
bearing humility with dignity… I abhor how my culture makes macho caricatures
of its men…I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me
and which have injured me in the name of protecting me.
109

Anzaldúa’s critical (re)positioning or intrapositioning, within feminist discourse in general
and Chicana feminism in particular, resonates with contemporary Chicana artistic
expressions commenting on issues with culture and identity. Martha Gonzales of the East
Los Angeles based alternative rock group Quetzal, for example, begins one of their
Chicano anthems entitled “The Social Relevance of Public Art” with the following stanza:
To make sense of me
I look to community
subconsciously changing my ideology
I look to the errors of my people
to solidify the me I want to be
sing the real, sing the real, sing the real…
110

72

Similar to Anzaldúa and other Chicano Latino artists, scholars, and social critics, Gonzales
practices a strategic essentialization in the process of negotiating her identity, through a
process of looking in from the margin toward the center and from moving from the center
to the margin, through an awakening from the subconscious.
111

Similar to Anzaldúa’s and Gonzales’ strategies of negotiating with culture and
tradition, Rosalinda Fregoso embraces the strengths of political and intellectual traditions
while discarding their weaknesses and limitations in order to create a “hybrid cultural
studies” appropriate to the study of the equally hybrid nature of Chicano films.
Incorporating Chicana historical and cultural sensitivities with feminist discourses of film,
she aligns her work and politics with US Third World feminist and cultural studies
scholarship that aims to “recover what nationalistic tendencies in scholarship and culture
left out: questions of gender and sexuality.”
112

Drawing from feminist insights on the role of cinema in the construction of
gendered subjectivities, Fregoso retreats from discourses lodged in a male/female binary
which ignores racial, class, and sexual subjectivities: those “crucial differences among
women, rather than simply between men and women.”
113
She is also critical of
poststructuralism because of its shortcomings in subject formation and difference, its lack
of theorizing about the subject positions of non-Western subjects. Seeing how, more often
than not, Anglo American ideas are deployed to maintain and legitimize its limiting
concept of pluralism, Fregoso also utilizes insights from postcolonialism in her critique on
Eurocentrism. Similar to my critiques of the Frankfurt School, she finds drawbacks in
postcolonialism because its nationalistic tendencies are sometimes “informed by the
geopolitical constructions and configurations of nation states” thus excluding sojourners as
73

subjects. Thus, Fregoso finds postcolonialism’s notion of 'transcendental homelessness'
useless for 'subalterns' like herself who “feel at home in the 'belly of the beast.”
114

Recognizing the limitations of theoretical frameworks is one of Fregoso’s contributions to
feminist studies. Her ability to incorporate and utilize the strengths of different
methodological approaches, to develop “hybridized eyes” through which to look at
subjects and the world, is important because it causes us to think about the validity and
ability of traditional epistemologies and disciplines to examine certain social groups and
topics.
In one of her most cited articles on historical methodology, for example, Joan Scott
called for looking at gender as a useful category for historical analysis and the
development of a new history. Writing in the mid 1980s she notes how early feminists
began to use gender as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship
between the sexes. Citing the classic article by Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy
Shrom Dye, “The Problem of Women’s History,” Scott points out how feminist scholars
claimed that the study of women, in this particular case the writing of women into history,
would necessarily involve an “enlargement of traditional notions of historical significance
to encompass personal, subjective, experiences as well as public and political
activities…”
115
Employing such a methodology, she finds, “implies not only [the
development of] a new history of women but also a new history.”
116
The ways in which a
new history would both include and account for women’s experiences, she concludes,
“rested on the extent to which gender could be developed as a useful category of
analysis.”
117
Similar to hooks, Anzaldúa, and Fregoso understanding the categories of race
and class as important analogies to the study of gender, Scott notes how the better work on
74

women’s studies “regularly invoked all three categories as crucial to the writing of a new
history.”
118
Additionally, Scott notes how academic interest in race class, and gender,
“signaled first, a scholar’s commitment to a history that included stories of the oppressed
and an analysis of the meaning and nature of their oppression and, [very importantly]
second, a scholarly understanding that inequalities of power are organized along at least
these three axes.”
119
Unlike Anzaldúa and Fregoso, however, Scott’s view still depends on
the validity of the nation state as an organizer of knowledge.
The important insights set forth by Scott is similar to other feminist scholarship and
gender theory that moving in a direction that attempts to extend its scope beyond the nation
state such as Elizabeth Dore’s edited volume Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in
Theory and Practice (1997).
120
As a whole, the essays in this anthology point toward the
possibilities of future scholarship on gender and Latin America that utilizes a combination
of Marxism and postmodern theory. Recognizing that the traditional version of the former
ignored race and gender as viable categories for examination, the authors note that a
postmodernist framework will allow for a more nuanced inquiry and analysis.
121
Though
not completely abandoning a materialist framework, the contributors to this volume argue
that class, gender, and race do not simply intersect, [but] in many ways they are/stand for
each other.” Adding a “postmodern approach” will allow them to see class as also being
racialized and gendered constructs. As such, they agree that these categories are not
mutually exclusive and therefore all must be examined in order to gain a better
understanding of history, politics, culture, and economics.
122
This methodological
approach, combining insights of Marxism with postmodernism, suggests that these two
theoretical views are different or separate. I am not convinced. Although I appreciate the
75

optimism shown in privileging multidisciplinarity as a methodological approach toward
scientific inquiry, what counts as evidence for the scholars still falls within the material. In
a way, some of these attempts to forge new models for scholarship are also attempts to
recover Marxism from the void it left in the late twentieth century; a sort of intellectual
Marxist guilt refusing closure or obscurity at the threshold of the twenty-first century.
123

Although sharing in the political commitment toward its subjects and social
transformation, the above examples show how the binaries once prevalent in the Frankfurt
School are no longer valid. Emerging scholarship is developing new theoretical and
methodological models to examine marginalized groups in interesting ways. What
remains to be seen however, is in which ways we take the lessons learned from Cultural
Studies and through attempts to “do” Cultural Studies projects and apply them on a more
global perspective. The increasing mobility of people, capital, and ideas characteristic of
our current era of globalization, challenges understandings of cultures and identities; the
ways in which they are conceived, studied, as well as taught. Whether on the street—that
important space which gave rise to the movements that eventually found a voice in the
university—or in the university—the ivory tower which in many ways maintains the social
system that created the conditions for social uprisings—much of what we know about each
other is both seen and veiled through the lens of the nation state. Examining peoples and
cultures from a more postnational or global approach becomes vital for attaining a more
nuanced understanding of the ways in which an increasingly mobile world and peoples
negotiate identities across and between borders and how nation-states handle groups which
can be considered perpetual non citizens, sojourners, foreigners, terrorists. As the world
becomes more integrated and separated, as cultural borders are continuously crossed at the
76

same time that physical borders become more visible and prevalent, there seems to be an
academic, political, and cultural urgency to find better or other(ed) ways to not only
understand the complexities of border crossings but, equally important, to academically
intervene and make these crossings not only less dangerous but also more promising.
While Cultural Studies seems to provide a more optimistic and democratic methodological
approach to scientific inquiry, I think that we should also be cautious of how, as some of
the better work in cultural and women’s studies is pointing out, through the process of
making the invisible more visible, democracy can also serve (and often does) to co-opt
informal modes of agency.
124
As Herman Grey has suggested, our work should include
not only a scholarly commitment to theorize and locate the day to day forms of agency but
our task should also find ways to recognize the ongoing routine, unofficial, and invisible,
as viable strategies for resistance.
125

Chupando / Consuming Chavela
I would like to return to the above mentioned cultural vignette of Chavela Vargas
the Mexican Costa Rican Ranchera Lesbian recording artist. The popular
re/de/construction of Vargas as a large serving of alcohol to be “chugged” is a cruel
metaphor for Vargas’ rich personality. Yet this symbolic drinking or consuming of Vargas
also reminds this writer of the relationship between the production and consumption of
popular culture and of the consumer’s role in creating what is being consumed. Using a
chela (beer) as a metaphor for Chavela (queer), many men and women locate and decode
the alternative messages Vargas clandestinely communicates while others do not. Some
77

lesbian listeners of Vargas’ music quench their homoerotic desires as they participate in
the masculine musical terrain of the Ranchera genre while different viewers see something
else. Although Vargas takes the stage with “body that is both sexual and mestiza,”
although she consciously places her sexuality and queer Mexicana persona center stage,
because the audience has agency to choose how to interpret her message, Vargas also
operates through a strategy of invisibility. So, as Mexicanos and Chicanos wipe chavela
suds off their lips, they do so only after consciously or unconsciously, psychologically and
physiologically accepting/ingesting a representation of Mexicanidad that is at once female,
brown, and queer, and at once visible and invisible.
78

ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1
See Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano
cultural studies in the 21st Century (Indiana University Press, 2002); Angie Chabram-
Dernersesian Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006).

2
See David Held and Anthony McGrew, Ed. The Global Transformation Reader: An
Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Polity, 2000) p. 1.

3
Ibid.

4
I am using “Countryfried Chente” as both as a counter-example to Eric Zolov’s “Refried
Elvis.” In this important monograph, Zolov showed how the American export of rock and
roll music and culture influenced Mexican politics, society, and culture. “Countryfried
Chente” comments on his argument that popular culture moved from the United States or
an American north, toward México or a Mexican south. “Countryfried Chente,” then,
suggests that there is also popular culture exported from México to the United States and
this export has important political, economic, and cultural dimensions.

5
For work on this topic see Aparicio, Frances et. al. Musical Migrations: transnationalism
and cultural hybridity in Latin/o America Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Dávila, Arlene.
Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City. University of California
Press, 2004; Also by Dávila Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People.
University of California Press, 2001; Dear, Michael J. Gustavo Leclerc, & Raul Villa, eds.
La Vida Latina en LA: Urban Latino Cultures Sage, 1999; Garcia Canclini, Nestor, “From
National Capital to Global Capital: Urban Change in Mexico City” in Public Culture 12.1;
207—213; Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity” in
Culture, Globalization, and the World-System :Contemporary Conditions for the
Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony D. King, University of Minnesota Press,
1997; Pacini Hernandez, Deborah, Fernandez L'Hoeste, Hector, Eric Zolov, ed. Rockin'
Las Américas: the Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America, University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2004; Kun, Josh. “File under: Post-Mexico” Aztlán 29, no. 1, Spring 2004; “What Is
an MC If He Can't Rap to Banda?: Making Music in Nuevo L.A.” American Quarterly
56.3 (2004) 741-758; “Frontera Fusion” Mother Jones, July-August 2002 v27 i4 p80 -81;
George Lipsitz, “World Cities and World Beat: Low Wage Labor and Transnational
Culture.” Pacific Historical Review vo. 68 #2 (May 1999)p 213, “Cruising Around the
Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles,” in Lipsitz, Time
Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990; Martinez, Rubén. "Corazón del Rocanrol" in The Other Side:
Notes fromNnew L.A., Mexico City and Beyond Verso, 1992; Naficy, Hamid. Home,
Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place Routledge, 1999; Negrón-
Muntaner, Frances. Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
New York University Press, 2004; Pacini Hernandez, Deborah; Fernandez, Hector
79

L'Hoeste; Zolov, Eric, Ed. Rockin' las Américas : The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o
America, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004; Saldívar, José David. Border Matters:
Remapping American Cultural Studies, University of California Press, 1997; Viesca,
Victor Hugo. “The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the
Greater Eastside.” American Quarterly 56.3 (2004); 719-739; Villa, Homero. Barrio
Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. University of Texas
Press, 2000; Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture.
University of California Press, 1999.

6
George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota
Press, 2001) )p. 3

7
For a discussions on the role of popular culture in maintaining and providing
opportunities to challenging asymmetrical power relations see Aldama, Frederick Luis.
“Cultural Studies in Today’s Chicano/Latino Scholarship: Wishful Thinking, Flatus
Voci,or Scientific Endeavor?” Aztlán 29, no. 1, Spring 2004; Aparicio, Frances. Listening
to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Wesleyan University
Press, 1998); Aparicio, Frances et. al. Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural
Hybridity in Latin/o America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Castells, Manuel. Rise of the
Network Society, (Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Dávila, Arlene. Barrio Dreams: Puerto
Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City (University of California, 2004); Dear, Michael J.
Gustavo Leclerc, & Raul Villa, eds. La Vida Latina en LA; Garcia Canclini, Nestor, Hybrid
Cultures Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. (Minnesota Press, 2001;
Gutierrez, Davíd. “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the "Third Space": The Shifting
Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” in Rethinking History and the Nation-State:
Mexico and the United States as a Case Study: A Special Issue The Journal of American
History, Vol. 86, No. 2 (September, 1999): 481-517; Hall, Stuart and Jefferson, Tony ed.
Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, Routledge, 1993;
Lipsitz, "Listening to Learn, Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and
American Studies." American Quarterly 42 (1990): 615-636.

8
See Manuel Castells, Rise of the Network Society, (Blackwell Publishers, 2000); George
Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota Press, 2001);
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

9
See Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos:
Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (University of Texas Press,
2000)p. 235; Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez Decolonial voices: Chicana and
Chicano cultural studies in the 21st Century (Indiana University Press, 2002).

10
Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos:
80

Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (University of Texas Press,
2000)p. 235.

11
Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and
Culture. (University of Texas Press, 2000)p. 235.

12
Ibid.; 17.

13
See Edward Soja “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination”
in Human Geography Today Edited by Doreen Massey, John Allen, et.al.. Polity Press
1999. And George Lipsitz

14
Villa; 233.

15
Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez Decolonial voices: Chicana and Chicano
cultural studies in the 21st Century Indiana University Press, 2002; pp. 2,3.

16
Excerpt from the famous Chicano epic poem I Am Joaquin by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales
(1972).

17
Tomas Ybarra-Frausto as quoted in Josh Kun “The new Chicano movement; Twenty
years ago, L.A. became the capital of a vital genre in the American art scene.” Los Angeles
Times (Jan 9, 2005) p I.12.

18
Mario Ybarra Jr. as quoted in Josh Kun “The new Chicano movement; Twenty years
ago, L.A. became the capital of a vital genre in the American art scene.” Los Angeles
Times (Jan 9, 2005) p I.12.

19
See for example Griswold del Castillo, Richard, et al. Chicano Art: Resistance and
Affirmation, 1965-1985. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery University of California Los
Angeles, 1991

20
Josh Kun “The new Chicano movement; Twenty years ago, L.A. became the capital of a
vital genre in the American art scene.” Los Angeles Times (Jan 9, 2005)
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/09/magazine/tm-chicanoart02 (Accessed 10-23-2007).

22
Ibid.

23
Ibid.

24
Ibid.

81

25
See From “A Bowl of Beings” in Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary
Comedy, Theater Communications Group, 1998 ; p. 93-93. This vignette was performed
as a monologue by Richard Montoya at the Mark taper Forum in Los Angeles 1992.

26
As quoted in David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change Blackwell, 1989; p. 7-8.

27
See George Sánchez Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in
Chicano Los Angeles,1900-1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; p. 9.

28
Ibid.

29
David G. Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the Third Space: The Shifting
Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico.” The Journal of American History 86.2
(1999)p. 483.

30
Sánchez (1993) p. 9.

31
Gutiérrez (1999)p. 483.

32
José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies,
University of California Press, 1997; p. 37

33
Ibid.; p. 56

34
See for example, Samuel Truett and Elliot Young eds. Continental Crossroads:
Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, Durham; London: Duke University Press,
2004; Davíd Gutierrez, “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the
American West” in A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West,
edited by Clyde A. Milner II New York: Oxford University Press (1996); pp. 67—89;
Albert Hurtado, “Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands: Bolton, Turner, and the
Historians‘ World,” Western Historical Quarterly 26.2 (Summer 1995); 149-67; David J
Webber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands” American Historical Review 91.1
(February, 1986); 66-81

35
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge,
1992) p. 7.

36
Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational
Imaginary Duke University Press (2006) p. 51

37
Ibid. p.391

38
Ibid. p.10.
82

39
Ibid. p. 9-10.

40
Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, (University of Minnesota Press,
2001); p. xvi

41
Ruben Martínez The Other Side: Notes from new L.A., Mexico City and Beyond
(Vintage, 1993 ) pp. 3

42
Harvey; p. 9.

43
Ruben Martínez The Other Side: Notes from new L.A., Mexico City and Beyond
(Vintage, 1993) pp. 3

44
David G. Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the Third Space: The Shifting
Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico.” The Journal of American History 86.2 (1999):
483.

45
Slowrider and Maldita Vecindad. “Mexica Xicano Connexion” in MexAmérica
(Angelino Records 2001).

46
Ibid.

47
Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, (University of California Press, 2005)
p. 95

48
Ibid.

49
Curtis Marez. “Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World Revolution and the
History of Hollywood Cinema” in American Literary History 17.3 (2005)p. 502

50
Michael Parfit. “Chiapas: Rough Road to Reality” in National Geographic: Emerging
Mexico Special Issue Vol. 190, No. 2 (August, 1996) p. 128.

51
See David Thelen et. al. “Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the
United States as a Case Study” A Special Issue The Journal of American History, Vol. 86,
No. 2 (September, 1999); Samuel Truett and Elliot Young eds. Continental Crossroads:
Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, Durham; London: Duke University Press,
2004

52
It is important to note that the women featured in her work are also artists in their own
right. Cristina Serna is a poet from Boyle Heights in East los Angeles and part of the first
83

cohort in the University of California at Santa Barbara’s new Doctoral program in Chicano
and Chicana Studies. Raquel Salinas is a performance artist and actor originally from
Downey, California and former member of the Chicano theatre troupe El Teatro de la
Esperanza.

53
Alma Lopez, “Ixta” ©1999.

54
Alma Lopez, "Our Lady," ©1999 Collection The Museum of International Folk Art,
Santa Fe, New Mexico.

55
See Yvette C. Doss “The Underground Music Scene of Los(t) Angeles Choosing
Chicano in the 1990s,” in La Vida Latina en LA: Urban Latino Cultures Edited by Gustavo
Leclerc, Raul Villa, and Michael J. Dear. (Sage, 1999);152-54.

56
Ibid.

57
Victor Hugo Viesca. “The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o
Music in the Greater Eastside” American Quarterly 56.3 (2004); 725.

58
Ibid. p. 724.

59
Ibid. p. 725; Interview with Quetzal Flores April, 2003.

60
Ibid. p. 725. Interview Flores April, 2003

61
Ibid.

62
Doss, Ibid.; p. 152-54

63
Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands / La frontera the New Mestiza 2
nd
Edition., Aunte Laute,
1999; 25

64
Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, (University of Minnesota Press,
2001); p. xvi.

65
Ibid.; p. 4

66
Ibid.; p. 7-8

67
Ibid.; p. 15-16.

68
Manu Chao, “La Primavera” and “Me Gustas Tu” Proxima Estacion Esperanza (Virgin,
2001).

84

69
Lipsitz, (2001) p. 29.

70
See “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” in Culture Globalization and the
World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity Anthony D.
King, Ed. (University of Minnesota Press, 1997); 52-53. Similar to Lipsitz, Hall asks the
important questions: "What is the nature of cultural identity which belongs with [a]
particular historical moment?" (p. 20) and “What would be an identity that is constructed
through things which are different rather than things which are the same?" (p. 39). In
answering these, Hall contrasts English globalization which "speaks itself as if it
encompasses everything within its range" (p. 21) with American "global mass culture,"
which does not obliterate local differences but rather operates its peculiar form of
homogenization through them (p. 28). Hall, like Appadurai, does not necessarily see the
nation state as the main organizer or prism for constructing cultural identity. Rather, Hall
sees the relationship between the state and identity eroding.

71
José David Saldívar Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies,
(University of California Press, 1997); p. 9.

72
Ibid. p. 190.

73
Ibid.; p. 4.

74
It is important to note that the theme/term of “La Jaula de Oro” was first sung and
performed in the Mexican ranchera classic “Gritenme Piedras del Campo” made famous
the legendary Cuco Sanchez. While this fact does not change the merit or meaning of
Saldívar’s findings, I feel that acknowledging the history of this term./aphorism in the
history of Mexican popular an folk traditions is important for those of us conducting
transnational scholarship. In other words, through “La Jaula de Oro”, Los Tigres del Norte
are not only commenting on life in the US but are also, and very importantly, paying
homage to Mexican regional artists, and important songs and motifs in the Mexican
popular imaginary.

75
Saldívar, (1997) p. 5.

76
Ibid. p. 9.

77
See for example, Helena Maria Viramontes, The Moths and Other Stories (Arte Publico
Press, 1995); Under the Feet of Jesus (Plume, 1996) and Rubén Martinez, The Other Side:
Notes from new L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (Verso, 1992).

78
Gustavo Arellano, “Their Charming Man Dispatches from the Latino Morrissey love-
in” The OC Weekly September 13 - 19, 2002. http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/48/music-
arellano.php.

85

79
Dávila, Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. University of
California Press, 2001.

80
See Jim Mendiola Speeder Kills (2002). Interview with “D.J. Pepper” June 2000.

81
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. “Crossing the Border with Chavela Vargas: A Chicana
Femme’s Tribute” in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, eds. Daniel Balderston and
Donna J. Guy
82
See for example the DVD extras in the Frida (2002).

83
It was reported for example that Julio Jaramillo, a famous ballad and huapango singer
during the mid twentieth century, was booed off stage after he “outed” himself as an
Ecuadorian. On a grander scale Mexicans of all persuasions were criticizing Spanish
Rocio Durcal’s “attempts” on singing in the Mexican ranchera genre. Even more
dramatically, she was criticized for covering the songs of the beloved Mexican composer
Juan Gabriel. It is important to note, however, that Juan Gabriel’s homosexuality didn’t
quite enter the public discourse as much as the idea that a Spanish woman would dare to
sing Mexican ‘male’ tunes. When one considers the numerous films in which Juan Gabriel
starred in on the eve of this popular culture national controversy during the 1970s, this gay
Mexican male is always featured as the lead male with but with a young and attractive
female love interest at his side.

84
Ibid. Yarbro-Bejarano; p.

85
See Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (Routledge,
2002)p. 90-91; 150-52.

86
Ibid.

87
See Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry”

88
See for example Shirin Rai Gender and The Political Economy of Development: from
Nationalism to Globalization, Polity Press, 2002; Beatriz M. Pesquera and Segura, Denise
A. “With Quill and Torch: A Chicana Perspective on the American Women’s Movement
and Feminist Theories” in Chicanas and Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic,
and Political Change, David R. Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz Ed. University of Arizona,
1996; 231-47; See also Davíd Gutierrez. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican
Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995

89
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, ed. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post-War Britain, Routledge, 1993

90
Robert Stam. Film Theory: an Introduction (Blackwell, 2000);p. 225.

86

91
Three founding texts that have been credited with framing the initial contours of Cultural
Studies are Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literature (1958); Raymond Williams’ Culture
and Society (1961); and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class
(1968).

92
Ibid. Edgar and Sedgwick; p. p. 285-86.

93
Stam, (2000); p. 170-171.

94
As quoted in Robert Stam, Film Theory: an Introduction (Blackwell, 2000)p. 171.

95
Ibid.

96
See for example on Robyn Wiegman American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender
(Duke University Press, 1995). By focusing on the confluence of these bodily scripts,
Wiegman hopes to demonstrate that the study of race and gender “must be more than a
correction to America’s violent and damaging historical exclusions.” (p. 9). It must also
resist the disturbing trend of contemporary theory’s approach to the study of race and
gender: “its assumption that the circulation of categories can accurately explain—by way
of a reference to compounded social identity—either the cultural dynamics of race and
gender or their various and contradictory historical productions. She wants to do this by
exploring more historically partial and contingent articulations of race and gender in order
to diversify the contexts in which we claim and explore their meanings. In short she wants
to “post their epistemological, corporeal, and visual modernity” (p. 9).

97
Stam, (2000); p. 171.

98
For a prominent feminists account of her involvement within the feminist movement see
bell hooks Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1984). Also
see Beatriz M. Pesquera and Denise A. Segura. “With Quill and Torch: A Chicana
Perspective on the American Women’s Movement and Feminist Theories” in Chicanas
and Chicanos at the Crossroads: Social, Economic, and Political Change, David R.
Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz Ed. University of Arizona, 1996; 231-47.

99
This collection of reflective essays is in part a sequel to Ain’t I a Woman: black women
and feminism, a project for which she did not receive much support, a book which was not
well received, and a collection of ideas though which hostility was channeled toward her.
This collection of essays, then, is in a way her response toward her critics but I also feel
that it is a response to her supporters as well.

100
bell hooks. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, (South End Press, 1984); p. 14.

101
Ibid.

87

102
Ibid. p. 15.

103
Ibid.

104
Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands / La frontera the New Mestiza 2nd Ed., (Aunte Laute,
1999); p. 18.

105
See for example, Samuel Truett and Elliot Young eds. Continental Crossroads:
Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, Durham; London: Duke University Press,
2004; Davíd Gutierrez, “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the
American West” in A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West,
edited by Clyde A. Milner II New York: Oxford University Press (1996); pp. 67—89;
Albert Hurtado, “Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands: Bolton, Turner, and the
Historians‘ World,” Western Historical Quarterly 26.2 (Summer 1995); 149-67; David J
Webber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands” American Historical Review 91.1
(February, 1986); 66-81;

106
Mary Louise Pratt Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge,
1992)p. 7.

107
Anzaldúa. (1999)p. 18.

108
Cherrie Moraga Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (South End
Press, 1983): p. 124-125.

109
Anzaldúa. (1999)p. 43-44.

110
Quetzal. “The Social Relevance of Public Art” in Sing the Real (Vanguard, 2000).

111
It is also important to note that while Gonzales’ ideology in shaped in part by
contemporary indigenous social realities, Anzaldúa leaves the contemporary indigenous
largely absent from her concept of mestizaje while at the same time identifying herself as
an indigenous person.

112
Rosa Linda Fregoso. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture,
(University of Minnesota, 1993) p. 21.

113
Ibid. p. 21.

114
Ibid. p. 22.

115
Joan Scott. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical
Review 91.5 (December 1986) p.1054.

88

116
Ibid.

117
Ibid.

118
Ibid.

119
Ibid.

120
Elizabeth Dore, Ed. Gendered Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and
Practice, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997.

121
Ibid. See Introduction and Nanneke Redclift ’s “Post-Binary Bliss: Toward a New
Materialist Synthesis”

122
Ibid. p.227.

123
For an example of some debates within the fields of Chicana/o Studies and Chicana/o
History see, Frederick Luis Aldama, “Cultural Studies in Today’s Chicano/Latino
Scholarship: Wishful Thinking, Flatus Voci, or Scientific Endeavor”? Aztlán 29, no. 1,
Spring 2004; Gilbert G Gonzalez and Raul Fernandez. A Century of Chicano History:
Empire, Nations, and Migration. Routledge, 2003.

124
Ann Matear’s “’Desde la protesta a la propuesta’: The Institutionalization of the
Women’s Movement in Chile” in Elizabeth Dore, Ed. Gendered Politics in Latin America:
Debates in Theory and Practice, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997.

125
See for example Herman S Gray Cultural Moves African Americans and the Politics of
Representation. (University of California Press, 2005). Gray argues that “representations
of black achievement do recognize and effectively make visible black presence and
accomplishment in the national culture. But they are no guarantors of progressive projects
for racial justice. Indeed, these representations of black people can just as easily be used to
support political projects that deny any specific claim or warrant on the part of black folk
to experiencing disproportionately the effects of social injustice, economic inequality,
racism, and so on” (p. 186).

He claims, for example, that “state and national campaigns for “color blindness” and
against affirmative action as indicative of this reality. “Black visibility is often the basis
for claims to racial equality, the elimination of social and economic injustice, and the
arrival of the time for racial invisibility.” (p. 186).

What he wants to question, is what he finds to be the “overinvestment” African American
cultural producers, media activists, and scholars in representation have in “visibility” as the
productive site of cultural politics. Recognizing the political impact and social meaning of
the “culture moves,” first against histories of black exclusion, denial, and invisibility by
89

American cultural institutions and second in terms of new possibilities for black cultural
production that get us beyond strategies of securing institutional and representational
spaces and defending black rights to be in those spaces. (p. 186).

90

CHAPTER TWO: AZTLÁN IN THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN: BOULEVARD
NIGHTS, LOWRIDERS, AND THE CONSUMPTION OF CHICANO CULTURE
IN JAPAN

“They love Chicanos over there! They love our culture!”
1

During a visit to Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet located in the City of Santa Fe Springs,
California about 15 miles southeast of the city of Los Angeles in the summer of 1996, I
unexpectedly ran into an old friend of mine. Sitting beneath a canopy on a plastic fold-up
chair behind a plastic poker table and before an oversized poster of himself as the vato loco
character “Chuco” in the film that made him a star, Boulevard Nights, Danny de la Paz was
enjoying the Sunday afternoon listening to oldies on his boom box and autographing
headshots for passersby for a small fee. At the time, it had been a couple of years since I
first met Danny at a theater workshop conducted by the Latino Theater Company at the
Plaza de la Raza Cultural Center for the Arts and Education in Lincoln Park, East Los
Angeles. He seemed busy talking to fans, taking pictures, and selling videos of Boulevard
Nights to the local market of cholos, Chicanas and Chicanos, and interested Latino folk at
the bustling swap meet.
Sporadically interrupted by fans and customers, de la Paz and I had an extended
conversation about Chicano art, politics, and Chicano film and theater. He commented
about working on a new independent film Road Dogz (Alfredo Ramos, 2000) in which he
had a major role. A bit crestfallen, De la Paz explained how the production was having
trouble raising the necessary funds to complete shooting the film. Although it seemed he
was also doing well with his post at the busy swap meet, De la Paz enthusiastically told me
that the bigger market for his stuff and Chicano culture was not in Santa Fe Springs, East
Los Angeles, or the United States. Rather, there was a huge demand for Chicanos and
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Chicano-style in Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan. “Dude! They love Chicanos over there! They
love our culture!,” De la Paz exclaimed. After we exchanged contact information, de la
Paz warned, “Don’t call me for a few weeks. I won’t be answering my phone because I’m
going to be in a wedding in Japan! A bunch of us are going to be rolling in bombs and
lowriders!”
It was not until I was in graduate school conducting research on late twentieth-
century Mexican American popular culture and globalization that I returned to that
conversation de la Paz eight years prior. What De la Paz told me about Japan, lowriders,
and Chicanos intrigued me on several levels. I began to consider what the consumption of
Chicano style and lowrider culture by Japanese urban youths can tell us about global
popular cultural flows in general and Chicano identity in particular, during the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. How does the cultural exchange between
Japanese urban youths and Mexican American lowrider aficionados complicate the
Mexican American narrative in late twentieth century Los Angeles? In what particular
ways does lowriding and Chicano style as a commodity figure in the popular culture flows
of an increasingly globalized world? How do urban Japanese subjects participate in
Chicano style especially in Chicano lowriding and in what ways does their participation
shape lowriding’s cultural, political, and economic contours in the United States? Does
this exchange between Chicanos and Japanese lowriding aficionados have an effect on
Chicano cultural identity and politics?
Ten years after my meeting with de la Paz at the swap meet in south East Los
Angeles, new scholarship in Chicano and American Studies was increasingly showing how
Chicanos have continued to actively reach out to other communities as well as forge
coalitions across physical and cultural borders. At the turn of the twenty first century,
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there were several accounts of notable and influential Chicano and Chicana artists and
intellectuals actively extending the notion of Aztlán across borders and over both the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans while struggling with and reconfiguring older varieties of
Chicano cultural nationalism. Due in part to the expansion of US empire in the post WWII
era, the relationship between the production and consumption of the film Boulevard
Nights, the facilitation of exchange of lowrider vehicles, and lowriding culture increasing
due to the exponential increase in global cultural flows characteristic of our current
moment, some Chicanos in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Los
Angeles struggled with globalization. At issue was the ways in which Chicano cultural
identity and politics would have to contend with the shifting nature of capitalism and US
Empire with which Chicanos and Chicanas have had a continuous and precarious
relationship. As such, some Chicano artists and activists began to develop a global
concept of cultural identity that moved away from previous nationalistic models. The
nascent cultural exchange between Japanese urban youths and Chicano and Chicana
lowriders which began in the 1980s, became the predecessor to larger shifts in Chicano
artistic expression and activist politics by the beginning of the twenty first century.
By the end of the 20th century, influential musical group Quetzal and musician
Zack de la Rocha, son of Beto de la Rocha of the 1960s art group Los Four and founder of
rock group Rage Against the Machine, would be actively collaborating with Jarocho
musicians in Veracruz, México while veteran Chicano rock/rap group Aztlán Underground
would perform and collaborate with Basque separatist group Negu Gorriak, in Spain. By
November of 2006 author, poet, and social activist Luís J. Rodríguez would take a 13 hour
flight from Chicago to Tokyo in order to investigate what he found to be the “amazing
Japanese connection to LA Chicano culture” that included music from East Los Angeles,
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lowriders, and cholo-style clothing.
2
Once he arrived, he was able to join a promotional
tour of East Los Angeles music with the founding members of Quetzal, Quetzal Flores and
Martha Gonzalez, D-Gomez of Monte Carlo-76, and Tex Nakamura of the legendary band
War from Long Beach, California also joined them on stage.
3
De la Paz’s enthusiasm of
and his direct participation in the nascent Japanese market for Chicano style back in 1996,
helps illuminate the importance of Arjun Appadurai’s claim that we need to develop a new
cognitive map to address the new global cultural economy. As Appadurai argues, rather
than understanding the world as isolated and separate nation states, we should consider the
presence of concurrent ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and
ideoscapes which undermine physical boundaries. Under this theoretical model, the avid
consumption of Chicano style and Lowriding in Japan is symptomatic of a globalized
movement of ethnic groups, images, technology, capital, and ideologies which allow
individuals, ideas, and culture to inhabit different ‘places’ at once.
4
As such, the export of
Chicano style and lowriding to Japan at the end of the twentieth becomes part of the larger
global cultural flows happening worldwide. The genesis of the cultural exchange between
Chicanos and Japanese lowriders at the end of the twentieth century, however, can be
found in pre and post WWII era Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and with the screening
of a controversial American film in Tokyo in 1980.
Boulevard Nights (Warner Bros., 1979) is one of the most iconic and the very first
mainstream American films to deal with Mexican American urban youth culture as its
central subject. In line with scholarship that illuminates the complex interracial experience
of ethnic minorities in twentieth-century Los Angeles, the history surrounding the
production of this film dealing with Mexican Americans, illuminates the intermingled
Japanese American and Mexican American experience in Boyle Heights prior to and
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during WWII.
5
The production and consumption of this American film also helps
illustrate how global flows of popular culture such as film have the potential to foster
economic and cultural change at the micro level in both producing and receiving countries.
In this particular case, an American film produced during the late 20th century helped
foster an economic and cultural exchange between Mexican American urban youths from
greater Los Angeles and Japanese youths in urban centers such as Nagoya and Osaka.
Edward Said has argued that mass media is a “very efficient mode of articulation”
which knits the world together. He finds that this world system, within which Hollywood
plays a dominant role, articulates and produces culture, economic, and political power and
“has an institutionalized tendency to produce out-of-scale transnational images that
[reorient] international social discourse...”
6
The international release of Boulevard Nights
in Tokyo in 1980 facilitated the development of a Chicano-style lowriding subculture in
Japan. It helped foster the creation of a micro economy between Chicano and Asian urban
artisans in Los Angeles and Japanese consumers in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka.
Additionally, the initial cultural exchange sparked by the film, helped lay the socio cultural
groundwork for future artistic and cultural collaboration between Chicano and Japanese
cultural workers by the turn of the 21st century. As such, Boulevard Nights provides an
opportunity for us to widen our disciplinary scope in the study of American popular culture
in order to bring to light global relationships that tend to fall beneath the radar when we
focus on models which privilege a singular nation state.
The relationship between Boulevard Nights’ production and consumption requires
us to look more closely at American popular culture in general and Mexican American
popular culture in particular. Josh Kun, for example, provides his excellent work with the
pioneering urban regional music genre group, Akwid. Blending the regional Mexican
95

genres of banda and norteño with Hip Hop and Rap in one of their most popular anthems,
Kun contends that "No Hay Manera" is the perfect place to unpack abstractions of "fusion"
by focusing instead on what Theodor Adorno called the "congealed history" of the song —
its historical layers, its union of disparate elements and epochs into a singular musical
space.
7
Kun sees Akwid’s musical style as both responding to and representing the circuits
of global culture within the context of late twentieth-century in Mexican Los Angeles.
That is, Akwid, as a group and as a producer of their musical style, is both a product and
manufacturer of the “ongoing Mexicanization of Southeast and South Central Los Angeles
and the subsequent centrality of Mexican migrant identity to the social structures and
economic circuits of contemporary Los Angeles.”
8
Their music reflects and reproduces the
ongoing transformation of Mexican migrant cultural expressions “from banda and norteño
forms to new urban hybrids based in genre mixing, bilingualism, and generational
reinvention.”
9
Thus, the creation of local musical forms in Los Angeles is both the product
of the global flows of commercial popular culture and the producer of them.
10
Kun
concludes that although Akwid's music responds to circuits of global culture, as a local
form this musical group also helps change what that global culture looks and sounds like.
11

In the following pages I take an approach informed by Kun’s work to examining
Boulevard Nights. This film’s genesis and distribution, its production in the US and it’s
consumption in Japan, also offers an opportunity to unpack its transpacific historical
layers, its union of disparate elements into a singular space, its "congealed history."
12
My
reading of Boulevard Nights through a congealed historical transpacific lens will help shed
light on the collective histories of Chicanos and Japanese Americans in early to mid
twentieth-century Los Angeles. This approach helps us better understand the late
twentieth-century relationship between the cultivation of discreet transpacific cultural and
96

economic exchanges between Chicanos and Japanese and the development of Japanese-
Chicano globarriological
13
identities on both sides of the Pacific. Boulevard Nights’
cultural currency between Chicanos in the US and their Japanese counterparts underscores
how Chicanos/as in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Los Angeles
struggled with a globalized concept of cultural identity which oftentimes seemed to
challenge and move away from nationalistic models. Additionally, it will be important to
note how popular culture functions as a vital marker of the changing dynamics in society,
as well as it reminds us to examine representations of Chicanos in cinema from a
comparative and transnational perspective in order to understand the ways in which this
ethnic group conceives of community and negotiates identities across borders.
I follow recent work in Ethnic and American studies that is interested in divesting
itself from reliance on epistemologies and narratives that work through a singular nation
state — what Prasenjit Duara phrased “rescuing history from the nation.” I find that
Chicano globalizations such as those represented and expressed through the production and
consumption history of Boulevard Nights, in effect, are helping to rescue the notion of
Aztlán from the United States.

Boulevard Nights on the Pacific Rim
Boulevard Nights should be understood as one of the many popular cultural productions
circulating within the globalized circuits of the Pacific Rim. Rob Wilson has argued that
the “ever-globalizing, regionalizing, and localizing Pacific Rim has become an
interconnected “technoscape”…linking city and country in a space-time globalized
maze…”
14
Because of this linkage, the “maze” Wilson refers to has not obstructed capital
or cultural flows that are evident in exporting and importing entities but rather facilitated
97

the exchange of commodities between governmental bodies on either side of the Pacific.
This is especially true with regard to popular culture within which cinema continues to
make up the most significant amount of productions. Quoting a popular Hollywood
aphorism, Wilson argues that the border crossing norm of cinema during a time of
accelerated globalization has generated “’films with legs.’”
15
That is, a film produced
anywhere can “maximize screen markets…and capital investments by crossing local,
national, regional, and transnational borders with commodity-like mobility...”
16
In
particular, mainstream Hollywood films have exhibited a clear example of mobility and
dissemination as one of the most successful and profitable US exports. Curtis Marez, for
example has argued that we should approach the study of popular culture in general and
cinema in particular utilizing a transpacific lens.
In his article “Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World Revolution and the
History of Hollywood Cinema” Marez calls upon us to utilize what he calls a “transpacific
triangle” approach to the study of American Popular culture, to employ a “critical
cognitive map that articulates American studies, Latin American studies, and Asia Pacific
studies...which [aims to] make visible transnational relationships that are obscured by a too
narrow focus on isolated areas.”
17
Aside from being useful in the study of US popular
culture, Marez’s view seems especially promising for understanding the Latino and
Mexican American experience in the US at the end of the twentieth-century. His work is
helpful here because this is a heterogeneous social group that has exhibited an exponential
increase in population and mobility both inside and outside the US more than ever before.
Immigration and Ethnic studies scholars have shown, for example, how contemporary
Latino immigrants have increasingly moved back and forth across the US and Mexico
98

border more than in previous times and with other immigrant groups such as the eastern
Europeans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.
18

In addition to utilizing a transpacific approach in the study of popular culture,
Marez’s view also warns against privileging a central node, of reinscribing Hollywood
dominance and US imperial power:
Rather than imagining cinematic power as originating from an imperial center
that… imposes its will on the rest of the world, we need to recall that historically,
Hollywood hegemony assumed its contemporary position of global dominance in
response to forces that opposed media enclosures.
19

Marez cites cinematic imperialism in Mexico and China, where Hollywood attempted to
restrict the promotion and dissemination of a nationalist film culture as case in point. He
dislodges reliance on and affirmation of a standardized Hollywood American center by
reminding us that imperialism also responds to anti-imperial resistance. Marez argues that
not accounting for examples of cinematic anti-imperialist resistance toward Hollywood
risks “formally reinscribing the very imperial ideologies one would otherwise wish to
dislodge.” Marez makes the point that focusing on an imperial center neglects what
happens on the periphery, what transpires on the margins of empire where resistance to
hegemony often resides.
20
Thus, in addition to looking at how films are distributed,
scholars must also take note of the liminal and marginalized spaces of empire and nations-
states in order to better understand the ways in which individuals and groups consume
cinema. According to Wilson’s and Marez’s view, we can see how Boulevard Nights, a
cinematic production conceived of and exported during the late twentieth-century, had the
potential to generate cultural ripple effects along the Pacific Rim.
99

The screening of Boulevard Nights in Tokyo sparked the development of a
Japanese Chicano-style urban youth subculture in major cities across Japan. Since the
film’s debut in 1980 the Chicano cultural innovation of lowriders and lowriding culture has
gained enormous popularity. As a result of the increasing popularity of consuming one
aspect of Los Angeles urban Chicano culture, it was easier for Boulevard Nights in effect
to lay the groundwork for future economic development and cultural exchanges between
Chicano artists in Los Angeles and their Japanese counterparts across the Pacific. As
lowrider cars, style, and ephemera exported to Japan grew exponentially during the 1990s,
micro economies flourished between Chicanos and African Americans in the greater Los
Angeles area and lowriding aficionados and brokers in Japanese cities such as Osaka,
Nagoya, and Tokyo. Similarly, as things “Chicano” and “west side” grew in popularity
during the mid 1990s, Chicano musicians, visual artists, writers, and cultural critics have
been performing, exchanging ideas, and collaborating with their Japanese counterparts
with increasing regularity.
21

100

The Genesis of Boulevard Nights

(Figure 3) Poster for Boulevard Nights (Warner Bros., 1979)
Boulevard Nights was the first major Hollywood film distributed with Mexican-
American life and culture as its central topic and the first cinematic production to showcase
an exclusively Latino cast.
22
One of the most popular and often quoted mainstream films
representing urban Chicanos and Latinos living in East Los Angeles during the 1970s and
80s, the box-office success (and current cult-like status) of Boulevard Nights in the US
helped cultivate and mold the Chicano and Chicana urban youth image in the American
psyche and in contemporary American popular culture. Popular with Mexican Americans
growing up during the 1980s, the film tested the market and set the stage for future
Chicano-themed Hollywood productions such as Zoot Suit, Stand and Deliver, Colors, Mi
Vida Loca, Blood in Blood Out, and American Me as many of these films recycled many of
the motifs and visual language first developed in Boulevard Nights. What is less apparent
about this earliest of mainstream American films to focus exclusively on East Los Angeles
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Mexican American urbanity during the 1970s, however, is its genesis within the Japanese
American and Mexican American experience during WWII.
The original script to Boulevard Nights was entitled “King Cobra” and was penned
by University of California Los Angeles undergraduate student Desmond Nakano, a
Japanese American native of Los Angeles. Developed under the tutelage of Paul Schrader,
noted for his screenplays Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), Nakano’s final script
as a student won him the prestigious Goldwyn Award.
23
While these factors afforded
Nakano exposure as a writer, the professional assistance in further developing his script for
major studio production, Nakano credits his personal experiences with discrimination as
well as his familial history with racism as key factors in framing major concepts for most
of his scripts both before and during his tenure at UCLA.
24

Between the early to mid 1900s Nakano’s family carved out a living in the multi-
racial East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. His father Tastuhiko “Lane”
Nakano attended Roosevelt High School and his uncle Lyle, his father’s twin brother, was
known for regularly sporting the infamous Zoot Suit around East Los Angeles during the
1930s and 40s. Living in Boyle Heights facilitated Nakano’s father and brother to make
friends with members of other ethnic groups living in a literal sense right next door to each
other. In ““What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiracialism
on the Eastside during the 1950s” George Sánchez argues that, given their exclusion from
the newly designated Protestant communities on the “west side” of Los Angeles, working-
class migrants from Mexico, Asia, the American South, and the urban Northeast and
Midwest settled in and around Boyle Heights in large numbers.
25
It was in this multiracial
environment where Lane and Lyle experienced their early and formative years. Although
the Nakanos attended school with Jewish, Italian, and Russian friends and neighbors, they
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specifically took a liking to Mexican Americans.
26
The Nakano boys’ best friend during
this time was a young Mexican American by the name of Guy Luis Gabaldón. The
Nakanos would regularly have Gabaldón over for dinner and slumber parties. During
summer break, the Nakanos would recruit their good friend to travel up north with them to
pick lettuce and grapes in the fields with the Nakano family.
27
The Nakano’s influence on
Gabaldón facilitated his acquiring the Japanese language well enough to help him join the
Marines during WWII even though he suffered from a significant disqualifying physical
ailment.
28
The military personnel’s unlikely decision to allow Gabaldón to enlist paid off
in the Pacific theater. Gabaldón’s Japanese language skills and his compassion and
appreciation for the Japanese people and their customs, helped him single-handedly
capture an estimated 1500 enemy soldiers and civilians during the war effort in Saipan and
earned him the nickname “the pied piper of Saipan.”
29
Both Gabaldón and the Nakanos
credit their childhood growing up in Boyle heights as reasons for Gabaldón’s unparalleled
success in the campaign and in becoming a national war hero.
30
The Nakanos experienced
war in a different way.
In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Nakano’s future parents Fumi and
Tatsuhiko Lane Nakano, were uprooted from Los Angeles and sent to internment camps in
Colorado and Northwestern Wyoming, two of the ten camps the federal War Relocation
Authority (WRA) established in 1942 to house 120,000 Nikkei under false suspicion of
disloyalty. Rather than stay incarcerated in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, Lane Nakano
decided to take advantage of the army’s unfathomable decision to allow Japanese
Americans to volunteer for military service given the fact that they were forcibly moved to
internment camps as if they were the enemy. Lane Nakano would be among two thousand
young men from various camps to volunteer for military service under armed guard and
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from behind barbed wire.
31
He would eventually serve in Italy and France under the
United States Army's famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the United States’
most decorated and recognized combat teams in the war and also in US military history.
The fact that Mr. Nakano would transfer his experiences from the real combat theater in
the Pacific and Western Europe to the silver screen in a popular Hollywood War film, sets
Lane Nakano apart from the many other brave Japanese American soldiers that served the
US in the war effort despite their unfair treatment at home.

(Figure 4) Lane Nakano as “Sam” in Go For Broke (MGM, 1951)
32

Lane Nakano was hired to perform the lead Japanese-American role of “Sam” in
the Oscar nominated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of Go For Broke (1951).
Conceived as a “tribute” to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team formed in 1943 by
presidential permission and made up of Japanese-American volunteers, the plot follows the
training of a platoon under the command of protagonist, and marginally racist, Lt. Mike
Grayson (Van Johnson) who has a change of heart after watching his troops fight
heroically in Italy and France.
33
This seemingly improbable experience for Lane Nakano
not only helped launch him into a modest acting career as an extra and in supporting roles,
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but it also helped influence his son’s decision to become a future screen writer.
34
In fact,
Desmond Nakano’s 2007 feature film American Pastime (American Pastime, Rosy Bushes
Productions, Shadow Catcher Entertainment, T&C Pictures, 2007), which he wrote and
directed, dealt with the role of baseball in an internment camp. Shot on location at the
Topaz internment camp in Utah, Nakano possibly was making a personal statement on two
American “pastimes”: Baseball and racial discrimination.
35
Desmond Nakano dedicated
the film to his father who was able to attend the film’s premiere in Topaz, Utah just before
he passed away. The Nakano’s collective experience and history with racism helped
Desmond Nakano forge and work through ideas about race and ethnicity that led him to
develop Boulevard Nights which would mark the first film in his oeuvre encompassing
issues of urbanity, race, and ethnicity.
36
Nakano’s acute awareness revolving around
issues of race and ethnicity in the US notwithstanding, he did not foresee the impact his
script “King Cobra” would have on Los Angeles politics, on Mexican American and
Latino youths in the United States, and on urban Japanese youths overseas in Tokyo,
Nagoya, and Osaka.

Boulevard Nights and Los Angeles
Mayor Tom Bradley, who declared the film “an instrument of peace,” was scheduled to
make an official proclamation before 1,000 members of the Latino community at the
invitation-only premiere at Westwood’s famed Picwood Theater on March 21, 1979.
Although official invitations were mailed on time and celebrities, social dignitaries, civic
and educational leaders were on hand to witness the mayor pronounce the film’s opening
day of Friday, March 23, “Boulevard Nights Day,” Bradley failed to materialize.
37
The
mayor’s conspicuous absence notwithstanding, the film had its gala premiere amid
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resounding festive mariachis, half a dozen resplendent lowriders from The Imperial Car
Club featured in the film, and a group of about 50 Chicano protesters with picket signs
reading “Stop Pimping off Chicano Youths!”
38
Despite and perhaps due in part to the bad
press surrounding this controversial production, Boulevard Nights grossed $832, 384
during its opening weekend in New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Two weeks after its
initial release, box office sales in the triumvirate Latino markets would reach an impressive
$2.2 million. This was welcome news to the production company and the film’s
distributor Warner Bros. considering the film was marginally publicized, screened in only
100 theaters, and was independently shot for 2.5 million.
39
Boulevard Nights as a cultural
production was a creative response which grew from the collective experience and history
Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans shared living in the Boyle Heights
neighborhood on the east side of an early to mid twentieth century Los Angeles laden with
racism and segregation. Nakano literarily brought to life the legacies of his forbearers in
his script and the film became a representation of and a critical response to the historical
and current tensions minorities faced in the city of Angeles. Indeed, Kun, co-curator of an
exhibition at the Grammy Museum called "Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles,
1945 to 1975" and which is part of a larger city-wide art collaboration entitled “Pacific
Standard Time,” explained how popular culture reflects the frustrations of minority
communities in Los Angeles’ past. Kun posits “one of the reasons why L.A. is here is to
be a place where as many dreams fail as come true, and as a result, we get pop music and
pop culture that is born out of the frustrations and pleasures and desperation and dreams
that get trampled on and realized in the space of those things."
40
Boulevard Nights’
moderate success in the popular cultural mainstream would foster unforeseen cultural
impacts at home and abroad as the film’s subject matter would introduce an America few
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people outside of the American southwest had ever seen to other parts of the world at the
threshold of our contemporary moment of globalization.

Boulevard Nights and Chicano Culture
Aside from introducing lowriding and cruising culture from Southern California to
audiences across the greater United States, Boulevard Nights would also provide the first
cinematic representation of Chicanos and lowriders to Denmark, Finland, Germany, and
Japan.
41
According to Danny de la Paz, who played the lead role as the troubled gang
banger Chicano youth “Chuco,” the film’s release in Tokyo in 1980 introduced Chicano
culture and Lowriding to Japanese youths.
42
Part of a larger wave of American-made films
released in Japan, Boulevard Nights received positive receptions by Japanese audiences.
The film’s popularity would in turn help set the stage for the local absorption of future
ethnic popular cultural forms from the United States such as rapping, break dancing,
turntableism, and graffiti art.
43
However, Boulevard Nights’ burgeoning fanfare was not
known to de la Paz in the early 1980s. It was not until his trip to Japan in the mid 1990s
that de la Paz would see, first-hand, the influence this film, his portrayal of the character
Chuco, lowriders, and lowriding culture had on Japanese youth culture.
At the behest of his friend Toshio “Machan” Masuda, de la Paz visited Tokyo to
attend a Lowrider car show in the summer of 1996. Machan was a former Tokyo b-boy, or
break-dancer, and proprietor of two retail stores in the Nagoya and Shibuya sections of
Tokyo called “Top Nation” that specialized in selling hip hop accessories, compact disks,
and clothing. According to the plan, de la Paz was to travel to Tokyo in part to help
Machan and his friends at La Firmeza, another retail store that specialized in quality
Chicano-themed clothing and accessories. In particular, de la Paz was there to help
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promote some new high-end Chicano-style sunglasses called “Sombras” (shades). Under
their agreement, de la Paz was to purchase his airfare and Machan would take care of the
rest. Guaranteeing good sales, Machan also suggested that de la Paz bring copies of
Boulevard Nights and some head shots or film stills to sell at the car show. Even though
de la Paz was aware that Machan and Firmeza were doing well selling Chicano products in
Japan, he did not expect what he saw once he arrived at his destination.
At the car show there were hundreds of sleek Lowrider cars, organized car clubs,
and vendors pushing Chicano music, accessories, and clothing. De la Paz was not as
surprised to see a large number of Japanese youths attend the car show as he was taken
aback when he saw Asians decked-out in baggy Dickies, creased white t-shirts, shiny
“calcos’ (shoes), and top-buttoned Pendleton long sleeve shirts. As de la Paz recalls:
“From far away they looked just like vatos locos but as soon as they got close it got a little
weird. They would go up to each other and bow. It was strange at first. Chicanos don’t
bow much you know.”
44
Aside from these vatos locos (or vatos rocos as some self identify
on the other side of the Pacific), de la Paz also saw other Chicanos and African Americans
at the car show. Some were visitors but others were vendors selling things American.
After he set his booth up to sell the Sombras and his merchandise, de la Paz also noticed
that off-duty United States servicemen from one of the local military bases in mainland
Japan also attended the car show.
45

When the local vatos locos approached and met de la Paz at his booth, most were in
awe of being in the presence the original Chicano gangster, the original vato loco from
“Big Bad VGV!,” as Chuco claimed in one of his more memorable monologues from
Boulevard Nights. Not only did “Chuco” represent the first Cholo ever seen on the big
screen in Tokyo, but Chuco also preceded all vato locos in US films. Danny de la Paz’s
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interpretation of the “Chuco” character came before Edward James Olmos’ iconic
character “El Pachuco” in Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1981), before the late Trinidad Silva’s
representation of “Leo 'Frog' Lopez,” in Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988), and even prior to
Lou Diamond Phillips’ depiction of “Angel Guzman” in Ramón Menéndez’ classic Stand
and Deliver (1988). The Chicano-themed films developed post Boulevard Nights owe
much to Nakano’s script and de la Paz’s performance. In fact, Nakano would also be
involved in writing another controversial Chicano classic for which Danny de la Paz would
also be famous: American Me (Universal. 1992).
46
This film is important for several
reasons. Like Boulevard Nights it featured an almost entirely Chicano and Latino cast.
The film also helped further develop de la Paz as a Chicano gangster icon for youths in the
US and Japan. Lastly, because of his previous work on similar subject matter, Nakano was
hired to write the screenplay.
47

American Me deals with the story of “La Eme” or the Mexican Mafia prison gang.
In fact, gang members were consulted and interviewed for the film’s research and
production, but some speculate that one cast and two crew members were shot and killed
during the production of the film because of La Eme’s involvement.
48
The film stars
Edward James Olmos as Santana, the Mexican American prison inmate who co-founded
La Eme in San Quentin as a means of survival. Santana is eventually killed at the hands of
his own people. An important character in the film is a gang inmate and member of La
Eme by the name of “El Japo” or “the Jap.” Played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa “el Japo” is
a Japanese-Mexican American who speaks Spanish and English fluently. Toward the end
of the film, el Japo is forced to choose between his loyalty to La Eme and the love for his
friend Santana when he is asked to help assassinate him. Knowingly sealing his own fate,
el Japo was the only close friend and member of La Eme not to participate in the public
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slaying of Santana. The refusal of the sole Japanese gang member not to participate in the
assassination of a Mexican American fellow gang member has important implications if
we look into the screenwriter’s history. For Nakano, the representation of street gang
loyalty and a strong bond between a Japanese Mexican and Mexican American is not
without precedent.

(Figure 5) Still of Lane Nakano (left), Guy Gabaldón (center), Lyle Nakano (right)
On the set of “This is Your Life” (Ralph Edwards Productions, 1957).

In Boyle Heights, during the Pre-War era, his father and uncle were members of a
street gang with their Mexican American best friend Guy Gabaldón. On June 19th, 1957,
Lyle and Lane Nakano, and Guy Gabaldón were interviewed by Ralph Edwards live on the
set of the popular National Broadcasting Company (NBC) television series This is Your
Life. During the interview the Nakanos and Gabaldón reminisced about their childhood.
The Nakanos and Gabaldón remembered that they were all in a street gang. This multi-
racial gang of which they were members was called the “Moe Gang” after the comedic
character if “Moe” of the comedy troupe The Three Stooges. They even had a secret
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whistle. The Nakano’s told Edwards that on a few occasions, Gabaldón “got them out of a
lot of trouble.”
49
Considering this, El Japo’s loyalty in American Me could be perhaps
representative of the experiences and close bonds his father and uncle had with their close
friend Gabaldón.

(Figures 6 & 7) Posters for the film Fukkatsu no hi or Virus (1980)
There is another instance of a Chicano Japanese entanglement through another
actor in the film American Me. Ten years prior to the making of this Chicano gangster
classic, Edward James Olmos appeared in another controversial film: the 1980 Japanese
cinematic production Fukkatsu no hi or Virus (directed by Kinji Fukasaku). In this film,
Olmos played “Captain Lopez” the commander of a vessel and part of a group of scientists
in Antarctica that must reach Washington DC in order to dismantle a doomsday device
after a military-engineered virus was accidently released during a plane crash and killed
the entire human population.
50
Olmos’ prominent role in this Japanese Science Fiction
Thriller can be seen as an audition for his next Science-Fiction cinematic venture, Ridley
Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner (Warner Bros., 1982). But before Olmos would to take
on the role of Gaff, the urban hybrid Chinese Chicano multilingual detective in Ridley’s
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Scott’s 1982 dystopic thriller, he graced the screen in a Japanese film of even more
catastrophic proportions. These Japanese Chicano connections have been important in the
development of two of the most important and iconic Chicano actors of the late Twentieth
Century and to Chicano cinema in general and the Chicano image on the big screen in
particular. The Japanese American influence in the production and development of the
Chicano image on the silver screen has been overlooked at best or at worst hidden. This
Chicano image, partially influenced and created by Americans of Japanese descent would
be exported to the land of the Rising Sun where it would have a very important impact on
Japanese youths in the late twentieth century.

“Chuco” Mania
Prior to Boulevard Nights’ release in Tokyo, Japan had not been exposed to East Los
Angeles or Chicano gang and car culture. In this Chicano gang and lowriding cultural
vacuum, the bravado-laden character of Chuco, became a Mexican American and Chicano
cultural icon in the US and especially with Japanese males in Japan, a group long
feminized in American popular culture. Let us return to De la Paz’s visit to Japan in the
1990’s. At the advice of Machan, de la Paz brought with him ten video copies of
Boulevard Nights and a couple dozen headshots to sell at the car show. Marginally
successful with Machan’s fifty-dollar Chicano sunglasses, he was able to sell all ten copies
of his film at $100 per tape and released his autographed “Chuco” headshots at twenty-
five. Shocked by the popularity of Boulevard Nights, de la Paz sold out of his merchandise
in a couple of hours. After the car show ended however, he would get a glimpse of just
how much this film and the Chuco persona mattered to Japanese vatos.
51

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After the car show ended, Machan, de la Paz and an entourage of vatos locos from
the show drove to a popular nightspot local Japanese cholos frequent. As de la Paz
remembers:
A bunch of us in lowriders drove to this town about six hours north from Tokyo.
When we got there we entered a nightclub full of vatos locos. When some of them
came up to Machan and looked over and saw who I was, it was as if Michael
Jordan had entered the room. Everything stopped and they went crazy! They were
completely into the character [Chuco]. When I shook one of the vatos hand I swore
I could feel his heartbeat on his palm. They seemed very happy to see me. It was
as if I had returned after a long trip.”
52

De la Paz was overwhelmed by the generosity and friendship every one of his newfound
Japanese homies extended him. Finding it difficult to spend any of personal money, he
was treated like the cultural ambassador of Aztlán. But he did not feel awkward.
Describing his interactions with some of the vatos locos at the club, de la Paz remembers:
“I felt like these guys were my brothers. We treated each other with respect. And even
though some of us couldn’t totally understand each other verbally, we understood each
other well.”
53

During de la Paz’ stay in Japan the irony of the situation became increasingly clear.
The first major film he appeared in, at that time seventeen years ago, and which had
sparked such a negative outcry from many “inside” and “outside” the Chicano
communities in the US. (which for better or worse, was “home”), had a very different
reception overseas. For the first time, it seemed to de la Paz, Chicanos in general--and a
Chicano-themed film in particular--were more respected, more admired, and even more
relevant in “el otro lado” but not of la frontera but del Oceano Pacifico! During one of his
final visits with friends, Machan presented de la Paz with a glossy fifteen-page full color,
Japanese language Boulevard Nights film program distributed at one of Boulevard Nights’
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original screenings. Although de la Paz had seen these promotional kits before, this one
was “beautiful” and written in Japanese.
54
Since Boulevard Nights’ release in Tokyo (at
that time twenty-two years ago), Chuco seemed poised to become an important cultural
male barometer through which many Japanese youths consumed and understood urban
Chicano culture in the US and from which they reflected their personal styles and
mannerisms, and through which they measured their degree of “vato loco-ness.”
For Japanese followers the characters Chuco from Boulevard Nights and “Puppet”
from American Me, both of which are underscored by a heteronormative hyper
masculinity, it may seem a little ironic to know that de la Paz is openly gay. At the time of
this writing, for example, de la Paz’s MySpace page read:
I am an actor and director. Most people are familiar with my work in AMERICAN
ME or BOULEVARD NIGHTS. I am gay. If u have any issue with other peoples
sexuality please get the fuck off my page. I don't need the drama. I like to keep it
real and I most def DO NOT suffer fools gladly.
55

Since the image of Chicanos in general and Chuco in particular are consumed by Japanese
youths interested in being vatos locos, how might a gay Chuco or gay cholo figure enter
into their personal styles and mannerisms? How might it inflect as a measure of their
degree of “vato loco-ness?” In Subculture: the Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige argues that
subcultures are expressive forms that articulate fundamental tensions between those in
power and those in subordinate positions. And it is the tension that is figuratively
expressed in the form of a subcultural style.
56
On the surface, it may seem possible that
growing up in an Americanized Japan, Japanese youths sought to articulate a new identity
different from the ones formed out of the collective memory of WWII or the post-war
state-sanctioned Americanized identity. Chicano or lowriding culture may provide
Japanese youths with such a tool for expression.
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The “ranflas ” (cars)

(Figure 8) “Car Hop” Screen Shot Boulevard Nights (Warner Bros., 1979)
Borrowed from the Imperial Car Club of East Los Angeles, Boulevard Nights also
featured very elegant and tricked-out lowriders that were visible throughout the film.
Whether the cars function as metaphors for tensions in love affairs as they bounce up and
down on the asphalt while distressed and jealous girlfriends impatiently look on from the
curbside, or whether the cars foreshadow coming events as when death becomes those who
drive fast, non-shiny or less than perfect rides, it would not be an exaggeration to say that
the vehicles in Boulevard Nights played important supporting roles. The cars driven by
cholos or gang members are not as resplendent as the vehicles driven by non-gang member
lowriding aficionados. Characters such as Big Happy (Gary Cervantes) of the VGV gang
and Toby (Robert Covarrubias) of the 11
th
St gang drive cars which have dull and faded
paint on the exterior, do not hop with hydraulics, and are noisy. By contrast, the lowrider
cars commandeered by non-gang member and lowrider aficionados such as Ramon
(Richard Yniguez) are brilliant; the engine hums instead of sputtering and the car bounces
with the use of hydraulics. Both lowriders and non-lowrider cars function as metaphors for
the characters and the lifestyle choice of Mexican Americans. The dull and faded cars
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symbolizes the life of gang members whom sniff paint and adorn their bodies with tattoos,
and destroy vehicles of rival gang members instead of painting and adorning their cars and
caring for their vehicles like the lowriders do. The lowrider vehicles play a prominent role
in the supporting cast of cars. It was these shiny and sleek cars shown cruising east
Whittier Boulevard, East Los Angeles at night that also rolled and bounced across movie
screens in Tokyo to the amazement of the audience. Not only did filmgoers fall in love
with the cars featured in the film, and many in the audience were tantalized with the
possibilities the lifestyle associated with these eccentric and awkward Chicano urban
innovations could offer them.
Prior to Boulevard Nights release in Tokyo, there were no documented low rider
car shows. Japan did begin experimenting with lowriders in Osaka vis a vis Cal Haus
hydraulics in the early 1980s. However small in scale, it was in this former WWII
industrial powerhouse city that some of the first lowrider shows and car hops were held. It
was also during this time that the first Japanese-language mini-truckin’ magazine was
published.
57
Within a decade, however, that would change. With the help of Low Rider
Magazine’s publisher Alberto Lopez, one of the very first lowrider car shows was held in
Japan in 1992 and drew roughly 300 entries. By the late 1990s, Japan would acquire an
estimated 3,000 American-made lowriders which were purchased for anywhere between
$25,000 and $35,000. Additionally, the production and export of these quality specialty
cars has increasingly become an alternative micro economic engine for urban Artisans in
Los Angeles’ inner city. In 1995, for example, shippers at the ports of Los Angeles and
Long Beach estimated that they moved hundreds of lowriders to Japan.
58
At the same
time, a growing number of Japanese “lowrider brokers” have not only visited but also
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relocated to Los Angeles specifically to take part in this nascent business and cultural
exchange.
59

A case in point is “House of Lowrider” that opened in Santa Ana in the mid 1990s
and with another shop now located in San Bernardino. These custom car shops are
operated and managed by Oishi Yuzuru who relocated to LA from Japan because of his
commitment to Lowriding, House of Lowrider became one of the top exporters of
lowriders to Japan by the late 1990s. In one of his more publicized trans-pacific business
exchanges of 1997, Oishi shipped a ‘super-clean’’62 rag-top Chevy Impala. The export of
what was referred to as “a national treasure” in a 1997 copy of Low Rider Magazine was
made at the behest of Kunihiko Tsuchiya, a Japanese lowrider broker located in central
eastern Japan. After making stops at custom car shops in the Latino majority cities of
South Gate, Santa Fe Springs, and north Long Beach, the Impala was sent from “Aztlán to
the Land of the Rising Sun” via the port of Los Angeles. The lowrider’s final destination:
Ibaraki, Japan.
60

While Machan’s and Oishi’s economic involvement with and commitment to
lowriding should not be overemphasized, Japanese youth attraction to and consumption of
one aspect of Chicano culture should also not be undervalued. Acknowledging the
economic investment made by Japanese vatos locos, Chicano lowrider culture expert
Denise Sandoval explains:
No example of low riding and American popular culture can fail to mention the
significance of Japan. Many Japanese youth love low riders and they have thrown
themselves into the culture like no other international audience. They even dress
like Chicanos wearing baggie pants and t-shirts that say Chicano pride or even have
an image of La Virgen de Guadalupe on them….For some of them it’s a way of
life.
61

117

Sandoval recognizes the sincerity and commitment to lowriding the Japanese have made.
Although she is careful not to uncritically celebrate this transpacific Chicano cultural
consumption, Sandoval reminds us that this subscribed lifestyle should be respected.
Indeed, as Mimi Thu Nguyen and Thuy Lin Nguyen have noted, the demand that popular
culture, and our inquiries into it, must offer some utilitarian reference for political
transformation refuses to take cultural work as a meaningful activity in and of itself, as
deserving of nuanced and open-ended inquiry.
62
Thus, urban Japanese youth’s
participation in Chicano style and in lowriding is “a meaningful activity in and of itself”
and thus, deserves our “nuanced and open-ended inquiry.” Thu Nguyen’s and Lin Nguyen
view that the Japanese participation in lowriding is a meaningful cultural encounter is
consistent with what de la Paz view about Japanese vatos locos, about Japanese’s Chicano
cultural appropriation and with what he communicated to me during our talk in the 1990s:
“they are really cool and dedicated…” “they love us over their man” “they love our
culture.”
Not everyone celebrates or embraces the current exportation of lowriders to Japan.
Vowing to never sell his ’64 hard-top, Fernando Ramirez, a local tow truck driver who
hauls lowriders to the docks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for export to
Japan, feels depressed whenever he sees one go:
It hurts. The day is coming…when there won't be any lowriders left. And we will
be buying our lowriders from the Japanese…We're going to want those Chevys
back and they won't be here, the Japanese will have them all. I've got a nice little
garage and I'm keeping my car for my son…He's 4 years old."
63

Similar to the way George Lipsitz has described lowriders functioning in US Chicano
culture, Japanese youths attempt to carve out a Chicano-ized alternative identity in Tokyo,
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Nagoya, and surrounding cities; these expensive imported specialty vehicles--too large to
comfortably cruise the boulevard and too bulky to park and exhibit on Japan’s narrow
streets--seem to counter the global corporate motto of “time is money” and the
stereotypical notion of things Japanese being “smaller and more efficient.”
64
It is also
important to note that these Mexican American vehicular innovations are very popular in
the city of Nagoya, a center which earns Japan 70% of its trade surplus and whose main
industry is automobile manufacturing; Japan’s Detroit. For Japanese in late twentieth-
century Japan, as for Chicanos in post WWII Los Angeles and the greater Southwest, the
production and consumption of lowriders illustrate an astute example of cultural
manipulation, but in an era of increased globalization.
65
This cultural manipulation and
consumption by the Japanese is affecting the cultural and political sensitivities of a new
generation of Chicano and Chicana artists in Los Angeles.

Chicanos in New Millennium
The cultural exchange facilitated by the production of the American film Boulevard
Nights at the end of the twentieth century symbolizes a shift in Chicano cultural identity
and politics. A new generation of Chicano artists has been moving away from traditional
notions of Chicano cultural nationalism and embracing a different, more hybrid form of
cultural identity which has caused some tensions to arise within this heterogeneous social
group. These generational political tensions amongst some contemporary Chicanos and
Chicanas, revolve around ideas of identity and culture and reveal themselves in works of
fine art, literature, and popular culture. Contemplating his temporal distance from the
Chicano Civil Rights movement, for example, visual artist Mario Ybarra Jr. from
Wilmington, CA says of Chicano Art “It's something I have learned as a history and
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acquired as a filter…I make contemporary art that is filtered from a Mexican American
experience in Los Angeles."
66
Ybarra’s disposition as an artist is similar to the complexity
of the subject personality previously described by Ruben Martinez. In his collection of
essays and travel logs The Other Side: Notes from new L.A., Mexico City and Beyond,
Martinez commented on the complexities of his positionality:
The 1960s are still etched into my memory, snapshots culled from the mass medias
collective conscience that appears alongside my recollection of the seventies and
the eighties...Mine is a generation that arrived to late for Che Guevara but too early
for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Weaned on a blend of cultures, languages, and
ideologies...I have lived both in the north and the south,...trying to be South in the
South, North in the North, South in the North, North in the South (p. 3).
In this passage, Martínez realizes that his identity has as much to do with his shifting
subject position as he “moves from place to place,” as much as his existence at this given
time in world history: “post-Che” and too early for the implosion of the Soviet Union.
This literary expression of Chicano subjectivity illustrates what David Harvey once
described as the “privileging of heterogeneity and difference as liberative forces in the
redefinition of cultural discourse.”
67
This “privileging of heterogeneity and difference” as
a positive force is what Ybarra refers to when he states that his linguistic aim would not be
"to learn Nahuatl, but to learn Mandarin or Cantonese."
68
And it is these hybrid currents
and experiences that were influencing and driving much of the Chicano art in Los Angeles
at the end of the Twentieth Century forward. But these hybrid currents produced some
tensions.
In her review of Phantom Sightings, Nizan Shaked reminds us that “in the early
1990s art informed by identity politics…enjoyed some degree of popularity, and was
120

examined by major exhibitions such as The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the
80s (1990), and the 1993 Whitney Biennial.”
69
The seeming popularity of identity politics
in fine art notwithstanding, much of this work initially praised by museums was eventually
lumped into what some saw as a politically correct cultural ambiguity: multiculturalism.
This dilemma with Mexican American cultural productions was espoused by Rosaura
Sánchez in 1987. Lamenting on what she saw as a paradox for Chicanos and Chicanas in
critical discourse, she found that “the questioning and subsequent denial of the subject
came precisely at a moment in history when women and marginalized ethnic minorities
were trying to assume their subject status to create a voice for themselves, to overturn the
‘othering’ to which they have been historically subjected.”
70
Thus, it is precisely at the
time when Chicanos began to develop a voice and articulate an identity in the larger Art
world that artistic expression which staked a claim to identity became unfashionable. As
Shaked writes, despite the fact that these shows consolidated a vast range of practices, they
were subsequently lumped into the category of multiculturalism, and many of them were
rejected for an alleged commodification of identity politics, or for assumed essentialism.
71

In “Rewriting Cultural Studies in the Borderlands,” Néstor García Canclini
contemplates the ways in which globalization and transnationalism may affect individual
and group identity formation and what this scenario may pose for the nation state.
Canclini finds that “an increase in transnational, intercultural mixing generates new
hybridities that are sometimes perceived as destabilizing the racial mix that defines what
we call national identity…”(p.280).
72
A relatively neglected issue in globalization studies,
cultural hybridity is important because it reveals the production of novel cultural forms and
practices through the merging of previously separate cultural experiences. As Michael
Dear and Andrew Burridge have put it, hybrids exist when different cultures come together
121

in the same place to create something that did not previously exist.
73
The hybridities,
however, are not always positive and can cause stress within a group. As is the case with
Chicanos, the generation of new hybridities reveals and amplifies tensions and divisions
within the group.
Rita Gonzalez, co-curator of Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement
(Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art April 6, 2008–September 1, 2008), has
conceded that “while identity politics is now largely seen as theoretically passé in art
school, some artists seem acutely aware of the problematic wholesale dismissal of
discussion of difference.” Thus, the tensions caused by the destabilization of the nation
amongst Chicanos… Some Chicano artists were interested in intercultural mixing and in
generating hybridities, but only if it was at the service of reaffirming a Chicano cultural
nationalism. A case and point can be seen in the work of Chicano rock/rap group Aztlán
Underground. Originally interested in performing about identity politics and Chicano
cultural nationalism, Aztlán Underground were not always focused on issues outside of the
US. As late as 1993, Aztlán Underground’s main artistic and political thrust emanated
from identity-politics and traditional Chicano concerns such as self-determination. As
Yaotl Mazahua one of the group’s founder concluded,
It wasn’t until the Zapatista revolution in 1994 and our trip to Chiapas for the
Chicano Zapatista encuentro of 1997 and 1996 and reading Marcos’ communiqués
that we started to see things differently. The earth is too small and the model of the
nation-state seemed too western and outdated. Land is for all.
74

While this pilgrimage to Chiapas with other Chicano and Chicana artists and activists was
understood by Aztlán Underground as a way in which Chicanos would be able to broaden
the political and cultural horizon, some Chicanos used the experience to reaffirm Chicano
122

Cultural nationalism. Although Aztlán Underground seemed to have widened their
political lens toward a more global setting, their fans have not always been happy.
Mazahua commented on how some of their most loyal fans were unhappy with the
fact that they were going to be touring in Spain and, worst yet, performing alongside
Spaniards!
We got shit from Chicanos when we toured with Negu Gorriak in Spain… They
were calling us sellouts because we were going to tour in Spain. But these guys
[Negu Gorriak] were saying the same things we were, were dealing with some of
the same things like maintaining their culture and language. We need to look
beyond that and see how the struggle is worldwide not just in Anahuac and
Aztlán.
75

Aztlán Underground toured with the popular underground rock, hip-hop, and reggae and
Basque separatist group Negu Gorriak (Basque for "Red Winters" or "Harsh Winters").
Influenced by groups such as Os Resentidos, Public Enemy, NWA and Shinehead, Negu
Gorriak advocates for Basque sovereignty, autonomy, and self determination. To the
initial surprise of Aztlán Underground, some of their dedicated Chicano fan base couldn’t
look beyond the fact that they were going to Spain and were even referring to them as
“sellouts.” They were oblivious to Spanish Activism. Although not dismissing them as
irrelevant, Mazahua realizes the need for Chicanos to look beyond old models of
Chicanismo based on a geo-politics like Anahuac and Aztlán as a means to further build
solidarities and mobilize across the globe. Aztlán Underground aims to become what
Mazahua refers to as “musical diplomats” or “cultural ambassadors.”
If the current era of capitalism is one underscored by the rapid exchange of
information and capital, and the development of cultural hybridities which suggest the
123

nation state’s inability to homogenize identity within (and without) its borders, we can see
Japanese consumption and US exportation of Chicano culture as an example of
Chicanismo functioning in a global cultural borderlands where it is increasingly finding
itself more at home. Some of the better work in Chicano and American Studies is
interested in divesting itself from reliance on epistemologies and narratives that work
through a single nation state--what Prasenjit Duara phrased as “rescuing history from the
nation”— Chicano postnationalisms such as these we analyzed and discussed in this
chapter, are helping to rescue the notion of Aztlán from the United States.
124

ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1
Telephone interview with Danny de la Paz March 5 2007.

2
Luis J. Rodriguez, “The Chicano-Japanese Connection” from Luis J. Rodriguez Blog
URL: www.luisjrodriguez.com/blog/2006/11/chicano-japanese-connection.html (web
accessed January 2007).

3
Ibid.

4
George Lipsitz. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics
of Place (Verso, 1994) p. 5

5
See for example George Sanchez Becoming Mexican American; Laura Pulido Black,
Brown, Yellow, Left.

6
Edward Said Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, 1993) p. 309.

7
Josh Kun “What Is an MC If He Can't Rap to Banda? Making Music in Nuevo L.A.”
American Quarterly 56.3 (2004)p. 743.

8
Ibid.

9
Ibid.

10
Ibid.

11
Ibid.

12
Ibid.

13
For the terms “globarriology” and “globarriological” I borrow from Arjun Appadurai’s
and Raul Villa’s notions of the “global now” and “barriology,” respectively. Admitting
that globalization has been an ongoing process of modern capitalism and thus not
necessarily “new,” Appadurai concerns himself with the “global now,” with the ways in
which the last thirty years has witnessed a drastic rupture in the pattern of social relations
globally. Due to this rupture, he sees the global now as an opportunity to develop a new
political and theoretical imagination to help make sense of the effects globalization
exercises on people's lives. To Villa “Barriology”, a term he borrows from the 1960s Con
Safos community Magazine and artist collective of East Los Angeles, is the Chicano
critical response to the “socially deforming” practices of what he refers to as
“barrioization.” He defines it as the “culturally affirming spatial practices” enacted by
Chicanos to carve out a “near order within a far order” or a city within a city. This
theoretical framework helps explain the ways in which Chicanos and Chicanas in late
twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Los Angeles creatively worked to develop
125

a transnational concept of cultural identity that deliberately challenged and actively moved
away from nationalistic models.

14
Rob Wilson “Killer Capitalism on the Pacific Rim: Theorizing Major and Minor Modes
of the Korean Global” boundary 2 34:1 (2007) p.117.

15
Ibid. p 118

16
Ibid. p 118-19.

17
See Curtis Marez. “Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World Revolution and the
History of Hollywood Cinema” in American Literary History 17.3 (2005)p. 502

18
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco & Mariela M Páez, Ed. Latinos Remaking America. University
of California Press, 2002; Davíd Gutierrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the
"Third Space": The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” in Rethinking
History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States as a Case Study: A Special
Issue of The Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 2 (September, 1999); 481-517;
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Crossings: Mexican Immigration and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives, Harvard University Press, 1998; Davíd Gutierrez, “Significant to Whom?
Mexican Americans and the History of the American West” in A New Significance: Re-
Envisioning the History of the American West, edited by Clyde A. Milner II New York:
Oxford University Press (1996); pp. 67—89; José David Saldívar, Border Matters:
Remapping American Cultural Studies, (University of California Press 1997).

19
Marez, Ibid.p.502

20
Ibid.

21
For example, author Luis J. Rodriguez, rappers Kid Frost, J-Pea, and Bands such as
Quetzal have performed recently on tours through Japan’s urban centers.

22
The 1979 Warner Bros. film Boulevard Nights was directed by Michael Pressman and
written by Desmond Nakano.

23
Warner Bros. Production notes for Boulevard Nights Ingle Collection American
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS). See
also Desmond Nakano biographic info Ingle Collection (AMPAS). Although it doesn’t
receive as much attention as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, it is important to note that Paul
Schrader also wrote The Yakusa (1974) a joint Warner Bros. and Toei Company (Japan)
production directed by Sydney Pollack about the Japanese mafia. The film was shot on
location in Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo, Japan.

24
Warner Bros. Production notes for Boulevard Nights. Ingle Collection American
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS). See
also Sam Chu Lin “The Burden of Desmond Nakano” Rafu Shimpo (November 11 1995).
126

25
See George J. Sánchez, ““What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews”:
Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s” in American Quarterly 56. 3
(September, 2004) p634-35.

26
See East L.A. Marine: The Untold True Story of Guy Gabaldon (Fast Carrier Pictures,
2008) Directed By Steven Jay Rubin, Narrated by Freddie Prinze Jr.

27
See “This is Your Life” NBC TV Episode YLN 251 ( 6.19.1957).

28
East L.A. Marine, Ibid.

29
Ibid.

30
Ibid.

31
Ibid. also Sam Chu Lin “The Burden of Desmond Nakano” Rafu Shimpo (November 11
1995). Desmond Nakano biographic info Ingle Collection (AMPAS). Lane Nakano
biographical information on Internet Movie Database
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0620301/ See also Roger Daniels “Incarcerating Japanese
Americans” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 16 (Spring 2002)
http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/ww2homefront/daniels.html

32
Associated Press “Lane Nakano, 80, a Soldier Turned Actor, Is Dead” The New York
Times (May 11, 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/movies/11nakano.html?_r=1
(web accessed 7/13/206).

33
Ibid. Warner Bros. Production notes for Boulevard Nights. (AMPAS). See also Internet
Movie Database (IMD) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043590/.

34
Ibid. Warner Bros. Production notes for Boulevard Nights. (AMPAS).See also Internet
Movie Database (IMD) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0620301/

35
Desmond Nakano’s latest feature film American Pastime (American Pastime, Rosy
Bushes Productions, Shadow Catcher Entertainment, T&C Pictures, 2007); See also Sean
P. Means, “'Pastime' screening celebrates Utah film talent” Salt Lake Tribune,
http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=5408353&s
iteId=297. (web accessed 3.10.2007). General information about the film can be found at
the Internet Movie Database URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825225/combined (Web
Accessed 8 2007).

36
Other films penned by Nakano and which deal with urbanity, race, and ethnicity include
Body Rock (1984), Black Moon Rising (1986), Last Exit to Brooklyn (1990), American Me
(1992), White Man’s Burden (1995 ), and American Pastime (2007).

127

37
Warner Brothers Press Release (March 20, 1979) “Mayor Tom Bradley to proclaim
‘Boulevard Nights’ an instrument of peace at gala preview event.” American Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS) Special Collections.

38
Elaine Warren “The Politics of a Gang Film’s Premiere” Los Herald Examiner (March
22, 1979). See also Pamela Moreland. “Boulevard Nights Protest Continues” Los Angeles
Herald Examiner (March 24, 1979).

39
See Screen International No. 183 (March 31 – April 7, 1979)p. 1. Also, “’Boulevard’,
17 Days, 100 Sites, 2.2 Mil” Variety Weekly (April 18, 1979).

40
Sanden Totten, “Grammy Museum exhibit explores LA's music after WWII” The
Madeleine Brand Show March 1, 2012 http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-
brand/2012/03/01/22738/new-grammy-museum-exhibit-explores-music-in-la (Accessed
March 2, 2012).

41
Warner Bros. Production Notes for Boulevard Nights. Ingle Collection American
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS).
Telephone interview with Danny de la Paz March 5 2007.

42
Telephone interview with Danny de la Paz March 5 2007. de la Paz was unaware the
film screened in Tokyo until his visit there in 1996.

43
Warner Bros. Production notes for Boulevard Nights. Ingle Collection American
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS). It is
important to note that Boulevard Nights preceded other American films and music dealing
with youth subculture. Specifically featuring the musical genres of Rock, Disco, Salsa,
and 1950s Oldies, Boulevard Nights preceded films which would introduce elements of hip
hop culture such as rapping, break dancing, turntablism, and graffiti art, to a wider
audience in the US and abroad. Major films which dealt with hip hop and youth culture
and which followed Boulevard Nights include Beat Street (1984) Breakin’ (1984), Body
Rock (1984; US; 85 Europe), and Colors (1988). Also see Lee Sang-Woo, “Film Trade in
Japan since the 1950s: Government Policies and Media Development.” in Keio
Communications Review No. 26 (2004) pp.59. During the 1980s, Japanese films
accounted for fifty-percent of box-office sales, falling from a high of seventy-percent
during the late 1950s. By the 1990s Japan’s local box-office impact would fall to forty-
percent with American films accounting for most of the rest.

44
Telephone interview with Danny de la Paz March 5 2007.

45
Ibid..

46
Warner Bros. Production notes for Boulevard Nights. Ingle Collection American
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS). See
also Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103671/fullcredits#writers
(Web Accessed 7, 2007).
128

47
American Me Internet Movie Database URL:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103671/fullcredits#writers (Web Accessed, 05.16.08).

48
Ana Lizarraga, a gang counselor who was a technical adviser to Olmos was shot about a
dozen times by assailants in ski masks. Two crew members were also shot. See “Federal
Indictment Accuses 22 In Mexican Mafia Investigation” The New York Times (May 2,
1995). URL:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE2DA1731F931A35756C0A963958
260 (web Accessed February25, 2009)

49
Ibid.

50
See Fukkatsu no hi (1980). IMD http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080768

51
Telephone interview with Danny de la Paz March 5 2007.

52
Ibid.

53
Ibid.

54
Telephone interview with Danny de la Paz March 5 2007. This Japanese program is one
of de la Paz’s prized possessions, he keeps it locked up and in storage. Warner Bros.
Corporate archives which have everything ever released by the studio, have no knowledge
of such a program’s existence. Currently I am trying to set up a time for me to digitize the
program to preserve and document it. As of late, I have yet to find box –office receipts or
numbers of the films debut in Tokyo. Any suggestions on sources would be very
welcomed.

55
De la Paz’s MySpace profile Page
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=19447776

56
Dick Hebdige. Subculture:the Meaning of Style, (Routledge, 1981)p.132

57
Paige Penland, “The History of Lowrider Magazine: What a Long, Low Trip It’s Been”
Low Rider Magazine 20th Anniversary Edition (January, 1997)p. 74-82

58
John L. Mitchell. “Lowriders Cruising to Japanese Market Trends: Inner-city
entrepreneurs capitalize on craze for customized cars.” Los Angeles Times (Sunday July
14, 1996) Part A, Page 1.

59
(Ibid.) Denise Sandoval “Bajito y Suavecito: The Lowriding Tradition.” Copyright by
Denise Michelle Sandoval 2003
http://latino.si.edu/virtualgallery/Lowrider/LR_SandovalEssay.htm [Web Accessed March
13, 2007].
129

60
“National Treasure: This Super-Clean ’62 Impala Has A One-Way Ticket to Japan” Low
Rider Magazine (March 1997). [Web Accessed March 13, 2007]
http://www.paigerpenland.com/lowriding/nat_treasure.html

61
Sandoval “Bajito y Suavecito: The Lowriding Tradition.” Copyright by Denise Michelle
Sandoval 2003 http://latino.si.edu/virtualgallery/Lowrider/LR_SandovalEssay.htm [Web
Accessed March 13, 2007].

62
See Mimi Thi Nguyen Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu Alien encounters: popular culture in Asian
America (Duke University Press (2007)p. 10

63
John L Mitchell. “Lowriders Cruising to Japanese Market Trends: Inner-city
entrepreneurs capitalize on craze for customized cars.” The Los Angeles Times (Sunday
July 14, 1996 Part A)p. 1 [Web Accessed March 13, 2007]
http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/1486/low9.htm

64
Ibid.

65
See George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture.
University of Minnesota Press, 1990; p 152-53.

66
Josh Kun, “The new Chicano movement; Twenty years ago, L.A. became the capital of a
vital genre in the American art scene. Now its inheritors are making work that reflects their
changing cultural reality” Los Angeles Times Magazine (Jan 9, 2005).

67
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (Blackwell, 1989) p. 9.

68
Kun, Ibid.

69
Nizan Shaked “Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement” in the American
Quarterly 60.4 (December 2008)p. 1057.

70
“Postmodernism and Chicano Literature” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 18.2
(Fall 1987): 6. As quoted in Chicanos and Film: Essays on Chicano Representation and
Resistance Chon Noriega Ed. (Garland Publishing, 1992); pp. xii-xiii.

71
Nizan Shaked “Phantom Sightings” ibid.

72
Néstor García Canclini. “Rewriting Cultural Studies in the Borderlands” Postborder
City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California Michael J. Dear, Gustavo Leclerc, Jo-Anne
Berelowitz Ed. (Routledge, 2003).

73
Michael Dear and Andrew Burridge. “Cultural Integration and Hybridization at the
United States-Mexico Borderlands” (Paper given at the University of Texas El Paso). p. 4
130

74
Aztlán Underground Phone Interview 03/15/2007.

75
Ibid.
131

CHAPTER THREE: NONCONTROVERSIAL CINEMA?: CHICANO CINEMA,
SWEATSHOPS, AND STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE IN JOEFINA LOPEZ’S
AND PATRICIA CARDOSO’S REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES

In the winter of 2002 the Orange County Weekly published an article by journalist
and Chicano cultural critic, Gustavo Arellano, this publication’s first Chicano full-time
staff writer and author of the popular column and book, Ask a Mexican (2007). Entitled,
“Real Cinemas are Controversial,” the article offered a scathing account of how
contemporary Chicano cinema is degenerately non-controversial:
As Chicano filmmakers broke into Hollywood during the late 1990s, Chicano
cinema switched from depicting a community under siege to a community of Bill
Cosbys facing the mundane concerns of everyone else wandering through a
Hollywood drama. The crisis in a Chicano film is now likely to be middle-class
angst: self-discovery (Real Women), the threatening of the family (Tortilla Soup) or
interracial dating (Luminarias). Chicano cinema is now producing films
reminiscent of la Época de Oro, creating a distinctly problem-free portrait of
Chicanos acceptable to the rest of the country.
1

Puzzled at Arellano’s assertion that the above-mentioned films depicted a “community of
Bill Cosbys facing mundane concerns of [those] wandering through a Hollywood drama,” I
began to contemplate his definition of Chicano Cinema. Cinema studies scholars have
shown how the topics and subjects explored through Chicano cinema in distinctive ways
attempted to respond to the types of oppression Chicanos faced. Many of these cinematic
efforts, however, tended to privileged oppression from a male-centered and hetero-
normative perspective while ignoring other forms.
2
Robert Stam has argued that the
Chicano Movement’s move away from its initial Marxist influence started to take shape
during the late 1960s with “the emergence of the new politics of social movements such as
feminism, gay liberation, and minority empowerment.”
3
Arellano also seems to be relying
132

on a model of interpreting Chicano cinema that utilizes representations of “minority
empowerment” yet, he ignores a feminist perspective. He also suggests that a feminist
perspective in the above mentioned films is oppositional enough to be considered true or
noteworthy Chicano cinema. Yet, Stam has also argued that “the move away from
Marxism did not necessarily mean the abandonment of oppositional politics; it meant,
however, that the oppositional impulse now animated a different set of practices and
concerns.”
4
To borrow the phrase from feminist activism, the personal was also political.
While recognizing that Chicano Cinema developed within the particular historical
context of the Chicano Movement’s struggle against racism and social inequality,
Rosalinda Fregoso, argues that the very first Chicano films, I am Joaquín (Valdez, 1969)
and Yo Soy Chicano (Treviño, 1972) may strike contemporary Chicanos and Chicanas as
conservative and backward.
5
“In terms of their antiracist politics,” she posits, “I am
Joaquín and Yo Soy Chicano are radical by comparison to mainstreams films and even to
most White-left film standards [of the time]; insofar as gender and sexuality politics are
concerned, they are not.”
6
Thus, Fregoso asks a critical question about Chicano cinema:
whom does Chicano Cinema represent? And who articulates Chicano Cinema’s parameters
for representation? To begin to answer these questions I offer that based on the founding
Chicano Cinematic works “Chicano” seemed to function as a sweeping term for Chicanos
and Chicanas, gay and straight and thus overlooked at best, or ignored at worst, other
subject positions within the cinematic and demographic minority. Given this observation,
Arellano seems to view Chicano Cinema through an historical lens. While cinematic
productions of the 70s and 80s such as Yo Soy Joaquín (1969), Zoot Suit (1980), and Born
in East LA (1987) privileged addressing Chicano oppression from a male-centered and
heteronormative perspective. More recent Chicano and Chicana films such as Luminarias
133

(2000), Tortilla Soup (2001), and Señorita Extraviada (2001), are far from being “Cosby
like” or “mundane” and comment on topics such as economic inequality, race, and
violence. But these newer cinematic productions also explicitly and implicitly explore
oppression based gender and sexuality.
7
Thus, more recent cinematic works began to
move away from topics and subjects privileging men, heteronormalcy, and masculinity.
Notably, all of the films Arellano labeled as “non controversial” featured women
in leading roles both before and behind the cameras
8
while the cinematic works he
christened “controversial,” and thus authentically “Chicano,” were male-centered and
featured men at the cinematic helm .
9
As Arellano’s stated:
the protagonists in the best Chicano films—the defiant pachucos of 1981’s Zoot
Suit confronting a racist court system, Cheech Marín’s pocho in 1987’s underrated
Born in East L.A. defeating a Byzantine immigration system, the inner-city students
who smashed their school’s victim-class expectations in 1988’s Stand and
Deliver—embodied the battles and triumphs Chicanos experienced in asserting
themselves in the United States.
10
[emphasis mine].
According to Arellano, Chicano Cinema is best defined and understood vis-à-vis male
heteronormalcy. There is no room in his paradigm of Chicano cinema for an accounting of
how contemporary Chicana and Latina filmmakers cinematically represent and respond to
the changing dynamics of political, economic, and cultural oppression that Chicanas and
Latinas face in the United States. From a male-centered, heteronormative, Marxist
perspective reminiscent of the politics of the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 70s,
Arellano may view the appearance of themes such as professional middle-class “interracial
dating” in Luminarias, the “threatening of family” unity in Tortilla Soup, and the “self-
discovery” of a young and ambitious working-class Chicana in Real Women, as antithetical
to traditional Chicano politics and culture. Indeed Arellano’s view seems to fall in line
134

with the mindset that Chicana feminists have repeatedly critiqued of the Chicano
movement: women’s issues were at best ignored or at worst silenced.
11

Arellano’s critique notwithstanding, films such as Luminarias, Tortilla Soup, and
Real Women Have Curves represent some of the contemporary voices of Chicana subjects
before and behind the camera. Additionally, these films can also be seen as a critical
response to Chicano cinema’s tendency to privilege men and heteronormalcy. Thus, it is
precisely because oppression based on gender and sexuality has been largely overlooked
and ignored in cinema in general and in Chicano Cinema in particular--and because the
nature of oppression both inside and outside the United States has shifted--that a
recognition and analysis of the progressive ways in which contemporary Chicana and
Latina filmmakers creatively respond to this reality is of utmost importance.
Of the three aforementioned “non-controversial’ films, I particularly appreciate
Real Women Have Curves because it provides an opportune text in which to study
contemporary representations of Chicana and Latina realities in global, immigrant, and
Latino Los Angeles. Additionally, this film cinematically addresses a topic that a growing
number of scholars have found to be of utmost importance in our contemporary era: the
relationship between gender and global capitalism.
12
Narrating in part how an ethnic
cohort of working-class women interact while laboring within the Los Angeles apparel
industry, Real Women testifies to the ways in which citizen and immigrant Latinas respond
to everyday social realities associated with larger processes of globalization. Thus, an
analysis of gender within the globalized Los Angeles apparel industry will be paramount to
study.
The importance of gender as a mode of analysis has been and continues to be
emphasized by scholars in various disciples. Historians Joan Scott and Vicky L. Ruiz have
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urged for an accounting of the daily lives and experiences of women in order for us to
attain a better understanding of the larger social reality. Scott, for example, has not only
called for incorporating gender as a category for historical analysis but also for the
development of a new history. Scott has shown how feminist scholars claimed that writing
women into history would necessarily involve an “enlargement of traditional notions of
historical significance to encompass personal, subjective, experiences as well as public and
political activities…”
13
In line with Scott, Ruiz has continually shown the importance of
using gender as a primary category of analysis in Chicano and Mexican American History.
Filling a gap in Mexican American women’s labor history in the American southwest, she
utilizes oral histories to develop the social contours of workplace culture of women who
worked in the canning and packing industry in California between 1930 through 1950.
According to Ruiz, some scholars see “Chicano history [as] just that--Chicano history.”
14

Taking a cue from Scott and Ruiz, we need “an enlargement of traditional notions of
[cinematic] significance” in order for us not to see “Chicano [cinema as] just that--Chicano
[cinema].”
15

Far from merely representing “middle class angst,” Real Women actually expands
the borders of Chicano Cinema by illustrating how contemporary Chicana/Latinas
negotiate and challenge the gender-based oppression found in the ever-blurring slash
between the public/private and global/local binary of the post-Fordist economy. Through a
comprehensive reading of Real Women I will draw out the ways in which this cinematic
project represents a critical accounting of the Los Angeles apparel industry and how some
of its central characters respond to and challenge this global industry through the practice
of domestic rituals specific to Latina culture. After a summary of the film’s production we
will touch on four guiding questions. In what ways is the business “Estela’s Fashions”
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representative of the Los Angeles apparel industry? What role does culture play in the
daily lives of the Latinas represented in this film? How do the citizen and denizen Latinas
represented in this film find agency in the workplace? How is the oppression faced by
these Los Angeles Latina garment workers tied to those faced by women in other parts of
the world?
Similar to other films by recent Chicana and Latina filmmakers, I find that the film
Real Women Have Curves adds to the current discourse that suggests Chicana and Latina
cultural productions sometimes act as critical counter narratives that challenge their
popularly perceived political, economic, and cultural positionality in contemporary US
society.
16
Similar to texts by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Pat Mora,
Helena María Viramontes, and Rosa Linda Fregoso, films such as Luminarias, Tortilla
Soup, and Real Women Have Curves, far from being degenerate representations of Chicano
film in Arellano’s view, are rather expanding the parameters of Chicano Cinema and
Chicana/Latina feminism. These films are contemporary reflections of, and creative
critical responses to, the shifting forms of economic, political, and cultural oppression
Latinas face in global Los Angeles.

A ‘Real Women’ Production
At the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, a graceful Lupe Ontiveros stood before a
cheering audience after the film she worked on, the Home Box Office (HBO) Newmarket
production Real Women Have Curves, received the prestigious Audience Award. Having
also received the Special Jury Prize for her performance in the same film, she looked
towards the enthusiastic Sundance audience and, with a tearful cast standing in solidarity
beside her she sternly declared:
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“Let me tell you, I am ever so proud of being here, in front of you to see this
masterpiece. And I want to thank HBO for having the cojones to... make it become
a reality, put it on the air, and the rest is going to be history!”
17

As Ontiveros gave thanks to HBO for having “the balls” to produce Real Women for air on
its cable channel HBO Latino, she could not have foreseen how prophetic her colorful
speech would be. The positive energy the enthusiasm for the film at Sundance was so
palpable, HBO would take unprecedented steps in the distribution of the cinematic project.
Additionally, the marketing strategies HBO utilized for both domestic and international
distribution, not only shed light about this major cable company’s conception of Real
Women’s target audience, it also provides insight into popular American conceptions of
Latino culture and community.
Directed by Fulbright Scholar and noted Columbian archeologist Patricia Cardoso,
Real Women is one example of how current Latino and Chicano popular culture can
provide insight into the contemporary realities of Chicano and Latino Los Angeles.
18

Layered with subplots that deal with salient social issues such as immigration, sweatshop
labor, educational and economic inequity, as well as a polarized service sector economy,
this partly biographical film was shot in 31 days on location in Boyle Heights, a
community in East Los Angeles. Based on Josefina Lopez’ stage play by the same name,
Real Women Have Curves is the coming of age story of Ana (América Ferrera), a first-
generation Chicana living in East Los Angeles. A graduate from Beverly Hills High
School, Ana has to decide between pursuing her academic dreams and potential, or abiding
by her mother’s wishes that privilege familial responsibilities and traditional Mexican
working-class gendered expectations. Encouraged by her Chicano teacher/counselor Mr.
Guzmán (George Lopez), Ana reluctantly decides to apply to New York’s Columbia
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University and is subsequently awarded a full scholarship to attend in the fall. Once Mr.
Guzmán arrives at Ana’s home to present her and the family with the good news, Ana’s
mother, Doña Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros), dismisses their enthusiasm by reminding
everyone that Ana is desperately needed at home and at work at her older sister’s garment
factory and thus cannot attend college in New York. Over the summer, Ana must endure
working in what she immediately realizes to be a sweatshop with a tight-knit, multi-
generational cohort of colorful Latinas including her verbally abusive mother. Ultimately,
Ana must decide if she will obey her mother and stay home or leave for college in New
York.
Financed by HBO Films for 3 million dollars,
19
Real Women premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival in 2002 after a mere two months of pre and post production
combined. This film had many firsts. It was the directorial debut for Cardoso, the first
screenplay and film adaptation for Josefina Lopez, the first feature film for Ferrera, and the
first lead in a feature for Ontiveros.
20
Real Women has been hailed as a “major milestone
for Hispanic American cinema, a film that could never have been made within the
constraints of mainstream Hollywood with its insistence that all women have to be thin.”
21

While this claim may be true, I find it inspiring and important to acknowledge how this
film succeeded in weaving important Chicano / Latino issues into its contemporary and
topical plotline. Before I go into a discussion about the important issues this film covers, I
want to briefly touch on other elements I feel helped make Real Women Have Curves a
“hit” with audiences and a successful Chicana/Latina cinematic production.
Part of this film’s success can be attributed to the strategies used in its release and
distribution with minimal advertising. Real Women was released in San Diego, New York,
and Los Angeles,
22
three cities which host large, multiethnic, and vibrant Latino
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populations.
23
According to the 2000 Census, the Latino populations for San Diego, New
York, and Los Angeles were 750,358, 2,867,583 and 4,239,959 respectively.
24
Although
the theatrical debut seemed to primarily target the Latino demographic, HBO Films and
Newmarket Capital Group claimed no intention to market Real Women solely to appeal to
Latinos. Rather, they were interested in engaging the larger market.
25
It is important to
note however, that HBO Films originally agreed to finance this project specifically for
release on its cable network HBO Latino.
26
Due to Real Women Have Curves’ positive
reception at two major film festivals, however, HBO took the unprecedented action to
release their cable film project theatrically.
27
HBO Films president, Colin Callender,
confirmed that “over the years there had never been a compelling business reason to [go
into theatrical distribution]. But this is a movie that addresses those issues.”
28
Although
Callender did not make clear what “those issues” were, it appears that he was specifically
referring to his decision to release Real Women Women Have Curves theatrically based in
large part on the overwhelmingly positive response the film received at both the 2002
Sundance and Cannes film festivals. At Sundance, for example, Real Women Have Curves
was awarded the prestigious Dramatic Audience Award as well as a Special Jury Prize for
the performance of América Ferrera and Lupe Ontiveros.
29
At Cannes, Real Women Have
Curves’ screenwriter George LaVoo, was named one of Variety's "10 Producers to Watch"
while Real Women received critical acclaim.
30
Real Women Have Curves was also
featured as the opening night film of "New Directors, New Films" at the Museum of
Modern Art and the screenplay by George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez won the Humanitas
Award.
31
As Callender stated, “it’s wonderful response at Sundance and its enormous
response in Cannes was an affirmation that this movie could indeed have a chance to do
well. Clearly there is an appetite in the marketplace.”
32
With “clear” reassurance that
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Real Women would do well in the larger market, HBO made the unusual decision to not
only create a distribution company for independent films, Newmarket Capital Group but
also distribute a “for cable” film theatrically.
33

Extending the marketplace to the international arena, HBO decided to distribute
Real Women globally. By June 2002, Callender had negotiated several key international
theatrical rights with companies such as Mosaic Entertainment and Optimum Releasing in
the U.K., BIM Distribuzione in Italy, Gussi in México, ABC Distribution in Benelux,
Momopole Pathe in Switzerland, Noah Communications in Isreal, Nu Metro in South
Africa, Spentzos Film in Greece, and ERFilm in Turkey.
34
Although Real Women Have
Curves was enthusiastically scheduled for release to an international market, both domestic
and international distributors recognized that the film’s success in the US was going to
help determine its success abroad.
35
As the new CEO for Newmarket, Bob Berney, stated:
“This is an amazing first film to distribute…I think this is a project that any distributor
would love to do…it will find an audience for sure. Word of mouth will definitely be a
driving force.”
36
Although Berney was sure of Real Women’s commercial value, he also
acknowledged the importance of utilizing non-commercial modes of promotion. As such,
HBO and Newmarket strategically capitalized on preexisting social networks which have
been both common and integral to Latino and Latino immigrant enclaves across the US
and Latin America to facilitate Real Women’s promotion and success. Berney learned
first-hand about the power word-of-mouth can have in both promoting and popularizing
independent films through his successful tenure at IFC Films.
As vice-president of Independent Film Channel (IFC) Films, Berney oversaw the
distribution of such independent success stories as Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También
(2001) and Joel Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, (2002) which grossed 13.6 and over
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50 million, respectively. Both films depended heavily and benefited from word-of-mouth
popularity for box office success.
37
Accordingly, Real Women did modestly for an
independent film its first week of release but ended the year with more than a validating
sum. Opening on 55 theaters in three cities on both coasts, Real Women Have Curves
grossed $183,772 its first weekend of release.
38
Within the next three months the film
would accumulate a total revenue of $5,844,929 with total domestic box office sales of
5,361,548.
39
Since it was only marginally marketed through the mainstream media, part of
Real Women Have Curves’ success was attributed to the power of word-of-mouth
recommendations through Latino social networks.
40
It is also important to note, however,
that other factors may have contributed to its box office success, such as the buzz around
the feature at Sundance and Cannes, as well as the film’s release in Latino majority
Metropolitan areas where Real Women had previously garnered support and popularity for
its successful run as a stage play by the same name.
41
Through the strategic use of the
popularity Real Women generated at two major international film festivals, the recognition
and incorporation of the existing Latino consumer base in major metropolitan areas, and
through the utilization of historic Latino social networks, the distributors were able to
gather popular support, attain complimentary advertising, and capitalize on contemporary
Latino social realities to increase the film’s chances for success.
42
It is no surprise, then,
that HBO Films and Newmarket decided to open the film in the global and commercially
volatile Latino metropoles of New York and Los Angeles. Doing so not only increased
Real Women’s domestic box office sales due to the large Latino demographic, but the high
visibility both cities’ media markets afforded the production would expand the prospects
for the film’s overseas ticket sales.
43

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Although HBO and Newmarket claim they were not specifically targeting the
Latino market, their marketing techniques suggest otherwise. While the strategy HBO and
Newmarket utilized in the distribution process indeed aided Real Women’s financial
success, what also helped garner the film’s popularity with audiences was a combination of
its topical subject matter and its working class relevance with Latinos and Latinas living in
the United States in general but in Los Angeles in particular.

Economic Restructuring, Immigration and Los Angeles Sweatshops
More important than debuting a film about denizen and citizen Latinas working in a
Los Angeles sweatshop is the fact that Real Women was shot on location in the Los
Angeles Garment District. Due to the economic and political saliency of the apparel
industry to the Los Angeles area, one may be inclined to ask if a film dealing in part with
the garment industry would be convincing if it were filmed elsewhere. Beginning in the
1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, the reemergence of the Los Angeles sweatshop
was partly the result of the area’s economic restructuring resulting from an expanding
global capitalism.
44
As high-wage unionized jobs in the automobile, tire, and aerospace
industries fled the region, low-wage manufacturing jobs began to multiply in Los Angeles,
among which the apparel industry was and is the lowest paying sector.
45
Resulting from
this economic shift, Los Angeles’ apparel industry became the largest manufacturing
employer in the entire county with over 122,500 employees as of April 1998 according to
the Employment Development Department.
46

It is precisely during the time that the apparel industry began to surge in Los
Angeles that the US saw a dramatic increase in immigration from México and especially
from Central America, which was triggered in part by the social, political, and economic
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instability in the Central American region.
47
US-backed systematic military oppression,
murder, and genocide of the regions poor and indigenous, for example, forced thousands of
the poor to leave their native lands to search for better opportunities in el norte.
48
Indeed,
migration from Guatemala through México and to the US is the topic in Gregory Nava’s
famous cinematic project El Norte (1983).
49
In the wake of this demographic revolution
sparked by mass migration from Latin America, Edna Bonacich & Richard Applebaum
have shown how the Los Angeles apparel industry mushroomed to become the largest in
the country, and an industry giant hiring mostly Mexican and Latin American women.
50

As such, the emergence of Los Angeles as a global manufacturing and trade center is not
only directly linked to the rise of global capitalism but this economic restructuring,
combined with the large influx of Mexican and Central American immigrants, made it
possible for cheap Latino labor to fuel the region’s dynamic economic growth.
Consequently, the rise of the LA sweatshop in the latter part of the 20
th
Century is also
directly linked to the large availability of cheap Latino labor which also helped racialize
the apparel industry “Latino” and gender it “female.”
51
Additionally, while the apparel
Latinos manufactured was sold throughout the country and exported all over the world to
produce billions in profit, the average garment worker in 1990 Los Angeles earned and
annual income of approximately $7,200, a figure which represented less than three
quarters of the poverty income for a family of three in that particular year.
52
This is the
economic reality that further concretized the economic disparities that would underlie the
heavy Latino presence in the Los Angeles uprising a mere two years later.
53

It is roughly during this time and under these conditions that Josefina Lopez, her
mother and older sister were at work in a Los Angeles sweatshop, and it was precisely the
experience Lopez gained working within this hostile industry that inspired her to write
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Real Women.
54
Additionally, the fact that three female family members labored alongside
each other helps illustrate the gendered reality that the rise of global capitalism and the
proletarianization of the workforce has specifically drawn young women into the labor
market to become the main worker in plants that engage in manufacturing for export.
55

One can also see this phenomena occurring on the US/Mexico border with the rise of
Maquiladoras, and in thriving in Central America and other parts of the world with
massive exploitive manufacturing projects in so-called “free trade zones.”
56
Thus, the
economic and social conditions depicted in Real Women are as much tied to Lopez’
memory and personal experiences, as they are visual testaments to the detrimental
consequences associated with the rise of global capitalism not solely in the global center of
Los Angeles but also in other economic regions across the globe.
Within the context of the US, the largest sector where this global restructuring is
occurring is in Los Angeles
57
which has been referred to as a global city. In her important
work New York Chicago Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities Janet Abu-Lughod claims
that even though the nature of globalism in Los Angeles is different from that of New York
or Chicago, “Los Angeles’ claim to be a global city—both in terms of economy and
demography—has been fully established” (p. 398). In Cities in a World Economy,
however, Saskia Sassen defines global Cities primarily based on the dominant modes of
high-end and low-end service-sector economic production. As such, Los Angeles doesn’t
fit Sassen’s model of a Global City because of its significant manufacturing base such as
the apparel industry.
58
While I agree with her claim that Los Angeles’ has a very
significant manufacturing base, I also feel that a less structural and more culturally
nuanced account of the apparel industry should also be taken into account. For example,
what happens when people hold dual or multiple attachments to both home and host
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communities? How does the shifting nature of global projects such as international free
trade resonate and inform the daily lives of people living in Los Angeles, and how do we
account for this?
American studies scholar George Lipsitz has argued that “the triumvirate forces of
technology, globalization, and international migration have transformed cities such as Los
Angeles into global centers.”
59
Given the fact that the majority of garment and tourism
industry employees in Los Angeles are Latino and Latina economic immigrants,
60
we must
take social historical consideration of how their very real social and cultural networks
influence and help change Los Angeles’ political and cultural landscapes. It is in this
sense that Real Women Have Curves becomes both a representation of, and a creative
response to, the changing economic landscape of Latino Los Angeles. In what follows I
will argue the ways in which this film illustrates how “Estela’s Fashions,” the fictional
garment business in the film, simultaneously becomes both a product of the globalized
apparel industry as well as an important site for resistance to the same enterprise.

In the face of a hyper/heteroauthoritative treaty:
61

Estela’s Fashions, Sweatshops, Gender, and Cultural Citizenship.

The first time we see “Estela’s” shop is through a subjective exterior shot of the building.
As Ana and Carmen are dropped off by Raul (Jorge Cerveza Jr.), Ana’s father, for her first
day at work, the name “Estela’s Fashions” is clearly visible above the front door of the
small, discolored building. Upon a closer examination of the modest building’s facade
however, one can see that the name “Estela’s” was painted over a whitewashed named
previously visible underneath. The only part of the original design which remains is the
stylized word “Fashions” which now follows “Estela’s.” Additionally, the font style of
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“Estela’s” does not match that of the word “Fashions” suggesting that there was a name
previously visible beneath “Estela’s” which was associated with the business once housed
there. The possibility that the business previously hosed there was a garment factory is
more than likely.
Relating specifically to the apparel industry, scholars have shown how its
globalization is due in large part to its particular characteristics such as low start-up costs,
high labor output, and high mobility.
62
That is, part of the permanence of the Los Angeles
apparel industry depends on its flexibility to move from one place to another as production
and demand may dictate. In fact, the apparel industry is so flexible that there have been
many cases where recent Latino immigrants have themselves started their own garment
factories.
63
In the mid 1970s, for example, Pascual arrived to LA from Guatemala and
began working as a sewing machine operator. By the mid 1980s he was able to purchase
four machines and, with his wife and kids working beside him, began his business by
subcontracting from a Korean manufacturer that paid him poorly. Pascual kept working,
saved money, and slowly purchased more sewing machines. Soon he accumulated enough
money and today owns more than thirty sewing machines
64
Pascual’s start-up was
operating during the time that Josefina Lopez, her mother, and sister were also laboring in
the Los Angeles garment industry.
Similar to Pascual’s story, “Estela’s Fashions” is also a start-up that subcontracts
from “Glitz Clothing Manufacturers” to assemble swanky dresses for national department
store chains such as Bloomingdale’s. Similar to Pascual, Estela ((Ingrid Oliu) is also
severely underpaid for the labor she and her workers produce:
Ana: (to Estela) How much do we get paid for each dress we make?
Estela: Eighteen Dollars.
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Ana: How much do they sell them for?
Norma: (interjecting) They sell them at Bloomingdales for $600.
Ana: Does this seem right to you?
Estela: Just work.
The above scene is representative of the typical working relationship between retailers,
manufactures, sewing subcontractors, and garment workers. The distribution of proceeds
for a typical dress selling at $100 retail, for example, breaks down as follows:
Retailers: $50
Manufacturers: $35 (22.50 for fabric)
Contractors: $15
(workers, $6)
(Source: Bonacich & Applebaum, 2000; p. 2, Fig. 1)
The above scenario illustrating the discrepancies between how a dress is produced, how
much it sells for and how much the garment subcontractor makes suggests that “Estela’s
Fashions” is indeed a sweatshop. Bonacich and Applebaum define a sweatshop as “a
factory or a homework operation that engages in multiple violations of the law, typically
the nonpayment of minimum or overtime wages and various violations of health and safety
regulations.”
65
According to this general definition, Bonacich and Applebaum make the
chilling realization that most garment factories in Los Angeles are indeed sweatshops.
66

Important to note about this fictional scenario is the hierarchical relationship
between Estela and her employees. This further illustrates the hierarchical structure found
within the garment industry, such as the amount the factory gets for each dress produced:
18 dollars. From this amount, the rent to Mr. Hiro (not credited) the Asian landlord, the
utilities, the fabric, the distilled water, and the worker’s wages must be paid. Being the
shop’s proprietor Estela must exercise power over when and how the workers get paid, as
is seen when she informs them that she can’t pay them until they finish a contract. For this
148

reason, Estela utilizes power over her employees in the sense that she is the one who
decides when and how she will pay their wages. To the extent that the above scenarios
represent the typical reality for garment workers in LA, “Estela’s Fashions” can be seen as
a microcosmic and cinematic representation of the garment industry. Additionally, Real
Women’s production designer Brigitte Broch constructed much of the mise en scene from
found items in the building where the sweatshop scenes were actually shot, a former
garment factory.
67

We have already seen how “Estela’s Fashions” is symptomatic of the larger Los
Angeles economy. In what ways however, does the fictional sweatshop represented in this
film illustrate a gendered space? Traditionally, home is understood as a domestic and
feminine space while work is seen as public and masculine. Partly a result of the changing
relationship between the labor/leisure or work/home dynamic characteristic of the post-
Fordist economy however, Estela’s Fashions represents both a public site of production for
the global apparel industry as well as the domestic space of the home. That is, this shop
represents the increasingly uneasy binaries between the local/feminine and the
global/masculine. As such, “Estela’s Fashions” becomes an important symbol in the film
because it not only helps blur the boundaries between the home/feminine and the
workplace/masculine, but also because it destabilizes any essential definition of these
social spheres. In what follows I will illustrate the ways in which “Estela’s Fashions” can
be seen as the product of and the local site of resistance to the global apparel industry by
looking at how gender and space is both represented and contested.
Gender as a Site of Resistance
In the Spanish language words are assigned a gender. Usually, when the letter “A”
is applied to the end of a given word it becomes feminine. Likewise when the letter “O” is
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applied to the end of a word, it is attributed the masculine sex. Bilingual Chicano and
Chicana authors have used Spanish language in their work for many reasons: sometimes to
stress a point, sometimes to culturally contextualize their work, sometimes to amuse.
Continuing this tradition, I want to offer a bilingual reading of “Estela’s Fashions.” That
is, I want to deconstruct the name “Estela” as an attempt to offer a new possibility for
meaning. This is important because I feel that the very name “Estela” illustrates an
example of the sometime unacknowledged ways in which Chicanos and Chicanas find
agency through the strategic use of culture. First, I want offer two words in Spanish
“estilo” and “tela,” meaning “style” and “fabric,” respectively. It is interesting to see how
combining these two terms makes the word “Estela.”
That is estilo + tela = est(ilo)ela or estela.
That is style + fabric = Estela
This makes sense when we consider that Estela, aside from being the name of Ana’s sister,
is also the bilingual Spanish/English proprietor of a garment factory which deals with both
“style” (estilo) and “fabric” (tela) on a daily basis. In this sense, the name “Estela”
becomes both practical and symbolic, as it provides an example of how culture plays a role
in both affirming and representing Chicano culture and gender vis a vis the use of
language. This is important because the use of the Spanish language is one of the crucial
ways in which Real Women communicates certain codified messages to specific members
of the audience.
68

In one brief but important scene, for example, Ana burns her finger while ironing a
fully assembled dress. Realizing that her daughter is in pain, Carmen approaches Ana,
takes her hand and gently caresses it.
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Ana: (burning her hand) Ouch!
Carmen: (approaching Ana) Aver. (Taking Ana’s hand) Hay mijita. San
sana colita de rana si no cura ahora se curara mañana.
Reciting this ritualistic saying whose literal translation reads: “heal, heal little frog’s tail. if
it doesn’t heal today it’ll surely heal tomorrow,” may not culturally resonate with an
affluent and non-Latino audience. This maxim, however, would be accessible to the
Latino working class audience members viewing the film. Having its origin in Latino
peasant and working class pueblos throughout Latin America, this healing ritual partly
based on indigenous beliefs is not a cinematic export of the dominant American culture,
but is reflective of the Latino immigrant’s working class collective memory and culture
imported to the US. Part of the vast idioms Latino immigrants bring with them from their
respective communities south of the border, the representation of such cultural expressions
becomes a strategic way in which Latinos transmit codified messages to a specific
audience. The code here is maternal love specific to the Latino working class audience
which adds a gendered aspect to the message as well as to the representational space from
where it is being transmitted: a garment factory.
The notion that gender is socially constructed and reinforced within the spatial
landscape has been explored by feminist geographers such as Doreen Massey.
69
As has
been noted through Massey’s scholarship, exploring the ways in which space is both
produced by and productive of gender relations is important because it can help us not only
analyze how space is culturally and socially produced, but it can also help us to understand
how gender relations are also culturally, socially, and spatially constructed.
70
With this in
mind, an analysis of the ways in which work and gender is performed within “Estela’s
Fashions” disqualifies it as a traditional model of the subjugated and masculinized
workplace because this garment factory becomes both the site of global production and an
151

alternate site for female agency. Rather than reinforcing traditional notions of gender and
worker/workplace relations, Estela’s employees’ reorganization of space and their parodist
performances of dominant sociocultural and economic structures illustrate how the
physical space of this garment factory also becomes a symbolic place where alternate
definitions of gender, home, and workplace are also constructed. Thus, this garment
factory undergoes a change that blurs the line between the work-space and home-place.
Representing the domestication of the workplace through the practice of everyday culture,
the factory floor becomes a public square flanked by a kitchen table where the workers
gather to chismear (gossip) and an altar where the workers sometimes congregate to pay
tribute to the memory of departed loved ones.
The findings of ethnographic projects exploring the notion of cultural citizenship
have suggested that it is through the use of cultural expression that Latinos not only claim
political rights in the dominant culture, but also challenge dominant constructions of
citizenship while “maintaining a vibrant local identity.”
71
Raymond Rocco, for example
has found that within the area of popular cultural practices, different Latino groups have
developed networks of both commercial and informal activities based on promoting spaces
for the affirmation of Latino cultures and identity.
72
Thus, producing a film illustrating the
performance of the private rituals of sitting at the kitchen table to chismear, and placing
ofrendas (offerings) on the altar for departed loved ones, not only pays tribute to the Latino
oral tradition of a consejando (advice giving) and to the ancient Mexican and indigenous
practice of El Día de Los Muertos, but also challenges the idea that work is public and
home is private through the performance of Latino culture.
The scene in which we find Carmen, Pancha, Rosalí and Norma sitting at a neatly
organized kitchen table positioned near the entrance to the factory, for example, illustrates
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how the workers constructed an alternate space through which to communicate with each
other and reenact a daily working-class Latino ritual.
Carmen: I heard gossip at the Chapala market…Our Normita ate the cake
Before the wedding. I heard that Norma’s fiancé convinced her to
have sex with him the night before. And after he had a taste…. A
hundred people at the church, the priest waiting, and he never
showed up for the ceremony.
Pancha : Hay que maldito!
Rosali: Desgrasiado!
Carmen: (Nodding and confirming what they said) Norma’s mother never
Approved of the man pero Norma insisted. No, no, no…A mother
knows the right man for her daughter…
Ana: (Smirking) Oh mom you are so old fashioned.
Estela: (To Carmen from her station at the sewing machine) No more
stories amá!
Carmen: (from the table to the sewing machine) Ay mija. That’s what I do
best. My Reason for living.

Sitting and relaying information to the younger workers, Carmen continues to offer advice
on life and thus she continues to practice a Latino oral tradition of telling stories and
aconsejando.
In another example we see Pancha light a candle, place the candle near her father’s
picture sitting on the altar, and pour a shot of Mi Amigo Tequila as Carmen and Rosalí
approach her:
Carmen: It’s that time again eh Panchita?
Pancha: Yes. (to Rosalí) It’s the anniversary of my father’s death.
Rosalí: (Looking at a picture of Pancha’s father). He was so handsome.
Pancha: Yes. He was a very elegant man. (pauses) The day he died, I
couldn’t pay the hospital. So I pretended he was still alive…I put
153

him on a wheelchair and I took him home in a taxi.
Carmen: You were a good daughter Panchita.

Lighting candles and placing items and images of departed loved ones during the
anniversary of their death is a common practice of Mexicans, especially during the
celebrations of El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead). This is not a common
practice, however, at the traditional American factory or workplace. The fact that these
women continue to perform domestic and traditional rituals at work is a testament to the
ways in which immigrants physically and culturally rearrange the workspace to fit their
personal and collective needs. Spending many underpaid hours laboring in the heat,
practicing cultural rituals at work becomes a way in which these characters can cope with
the environment.
This strategy of blurring the binary between public and private through the practice
of culture is not unique to this film, but rather a reflection of contemporary Latino realities.
Scholarship on Cultural Citizenship, for example, shows how denizen and citizen Latinos
find creative and alternative ways to become social actors through counter discourses of
citizenship. William Flores and Rina Benmayor find that Latino musicians have succeeded
in bringing with them “distinctly Latino idioms” into the daily life of the US.
73
Similarly,
the dominant construction of home as a domestic, private, and local place has been
challenged by recent Chican@ musical productions. The musical renditions of veteran
East Los Angeles band Quetzal, for example, challenge the idea that home is solely
constructed as a domestic or private geography by lyrically importing external urban tropes
into the idea of “home.” In “This is My Home,” the first track of their third album
Worksongs (Vanguard, 2003), the image of home is constructed as follows:
154

This is my home
This is my home
Hot Concrete, Rusted Fences
Armed with the constant noise of traffic
This is my home
Life is met with sunrise and sunsets
From Sun up to sundown
It catches me when I frown
And when I need a place to be alone
Home!
74

The lyrics from Quetzal’s ambient and son jarocho inspired “This is My Home” helps
illustrate a way in which public, barrio-esque, and geographic metaphors are used to
reconstruct the notion of home. Just as “Estela’s Fashions” blurs the home/work,
local/global binary, Quetzal’s song also problematizes the idea that home is solely located
in the “private” side of the dominant public/private binary. In this song, the notion of
“home” is not only constructed by “Hot Concrete” and “Rusted Fences,” but it is also
communicated through the “constant noise of traffic.” Additionally, the production of
Worksongs as a whole was influenced not solely through the sociopolitical and geographic
realities associated with living in Los Angeles in general or the barrio of Lincoln Heights,
in particular.
75
Rather, this musical social document is also informed by and through
Quetzal’s direct participation with Jarocho musicians from Veracruz, México, which is the
birthplace of the Son Jarocho.
76
For example, Quetzal’s album “Worksongs” was heavily
influenced from the musical group’s participation with the “Encuentro Jarocho” Quetzal
helped organize in Veracruz, Mexico in 2002 and with the musical group’s participation
with Jarocho musicians in the US and México. This influence is audible throughout the
group’s repertoire most notably through the constant presence of the requínto or jarana,
two traditional musical instruments essential to the traditional son jarocho. This is not to
155

imply that Quetzal is staking a claim in producing an authentic jarocho sound rather, as
was explained to me by Quetzal Flores, one of the musical group’s founders, they are
interested in collaboratively developing a rendition of the Son Jarocho through their
Chican@ social, cultural, and political subject sensitivities.
77
As such, this construction of
“home” not only challenges the public/private binary but also adds a transnational
component to their musical repertoire which serves to problematize a necessary disjuncture
between the local/global binary. Thus, through the practice and performance of culture,
Quetzal succeeds in not only disrupting the dominant notion of a split between the
public/private binary but also helps to musically link the local to the global. Taking
example into account, we can see how Real Women Have Curves also links the global to
the local through the practice of Latin American rituals and the reconstruction of space
within the oppressive territory of a United States sweatshop. As such, the domestication of
the workplace becomes a strategy, a way in which exploited workers cope with the
detrimental effects of the workplace by refashioning, redecorating, re-performing the
workplace in their own way.
78

Similar to the way Estela’s employees domesticate the workplace, “Estela’s
Fashions” also functions as a public square, a place where citizen and denizen Latina
subjects interact, converse, and organize. Here, the garment factory becomes a nexus for
what sociologists and immigration scholars call social networking. In “U.S. Immigration
Policies and Trends: The Growing Importance of Migration from México” Susan Gonzalez
Baker et. al. discuss the role of immigrant social networks in hiring practices of US
employers:
Mexican immigrant supervisors contributed significantly to the concentration of
Mexican workers in large and small firms. Once hiring and firing power rested
156

with Mexican immigrant supervisors, those powers led to the increasing of
portions of the firms workforce including kin and countrymen
79

Illustrating how immigrant workers organize themselves and become employee recruiters,
Baker’s findings help us to understand the relationship between some of Estela’s
employees, and also helps to explain why half of them are related, as with Dona Carlota
(Sandie Torres), Norma (Lina Acosta), and her two sisters Lupita and Angelica (no credits
given). Even more important however, this example shows us how immigrant workers
themselves take action to compensate for the oftentimes drab economy where well-paying
jobs are scarce. The use of social networks can also be seen as a response to
institutionalized racism and the political red tape disallowing “undocumented” workers to
attain “legitimate” jobs due to not having “proper” documentation. As such, “Estela’s
Fashions” represents an alternate space which facilitates critical interactions between
citizen and denizen female Latina subjects. The reorganization of the shop’s physical
space and the performance of domestic rituals, then, makes possible an alternate, critical
envisioning and definition of the workplace and that opens the possibility for social
action.
80
Through this alternative envisioning and performance within “Estela’s
Fashions,” an envisioning of alternative world and self-views becomes plausible.
Similar to how feminists have criticized a masculinized world, Real Women
symbolically feminizes the globe. This is significant because one of the arguments posed
by globalization theorists such as Doreen Massey and Shirin Rai, for example, is that part
in parcel with globalization is the masculinization of the economy at the international,
state, and local level.
81
This being the case, retaining a multidimensional (economic,
political, cultural) masculinity becomes a state project. To Rai, the controlling of the
female body by the nation-state becomes essential for it to remain in control to retain a
157

masculine order of things. In other words, conditioning the female body to imagine,
behave, and look a certain way becomes an essential way in which the state asserts and
retains its sociopolitical, economic, and cultural masculinity/control.
82
Similar to how
Susan Bordo sees the physical body is an “instrument and medium of power,”
83
alternative
imaginings and performances of the female body, or individual control of the female body,
is a potential threat to the political, economic, and cultural spheres of an always already
masculinized society.
84
Real Women succeeds in challenging this bleak scenario through
the use of parody.
As most sweatshop conditions around the globe, “Estela’s Fashions,” was
sweltering in the summer with no air conditioning or ventilation. In fact, the only fan the
workers had was not to be used because it Estela reminded them the fan “blew dust on the
dresses.” It is in this scenario where one of Real Women Have Curves’ more memorable
scenes takes shape as the women disrobe to deal with the heat. Illustrating more than a
group of normal Latina women rejecting the feminine status quo by coming to terms with
their individual beauty, this scene is also important because the characters symbolically
place a global map on their nude bodies by embracing their collective blemishes and
imperfections. After removing their clothes due to the sweltering heat and urged on by
Ana, the youngest and most liberal minded of the group of workers, Rosalí, Estela, and
Pancha start comparing each others weight, cellulite, and stretch marks.

Rosalí: (removing her pants and pointing at her hips) But look at these hips.
I got stretch marks on my chi chis.
Estela: (getting up to join them) You wanna see stretch marks? (removing
Her blouse) Mine go from north to south. (She points to her right
side).
158

Pancha: (Interjecting and moving towards them) Ladies…ladies…please.
You wanna see stretch marks? Mine go from east to west.

Aside from placing the four cardinal points on their exposed bodies, “from north to south”
and from “east to west” this performance also parodies the “catwalk.” Whereas
dangerously thin models ignore the conditions under which the fashions they parade are
produced as they strut down runways inside a controlled climate, Ana, Rosalí, Estela, and
Pancha show off their bodily “imperfections” in the sweltering heat where the fashions the
models wear are produced. Placing the cardinal points on their exposed bodies and
parodying the catwalk within the space where the fashions are produced, provides a
symbolic re-feminization of the deterritorialized apparel industry because the characters
directly challenge the dominant order of things. If the racialized female workers are able
to reconstruct the private in the public, the home in the workplace, the catwalk in the
sweatshop, and if they are able to re-perform and re-envision femininity and beauty on
their own terms, then any essentialized definition of these traditional categories become
problematized. In doing so, the characters in Real Women open the possibility of alternate
modes of seeing and performing the female self both from a localized socioeconomic
cultural geography and through alternate public participations in the global apparel
industry.
Recognizing the apparel industry as one of the primary global industries where
women make up the overwhelming majority, one can not only see a commonality between
the garment workers in Los Angeles, Bangladesh, La Puente, Ciudad Juarez, San Salvador,
and Saipan, but also a relationship between global capitalism and gender exploitation.
Flexible capitalism, as Massey has suggested, becomes synonymous with flexible
159

sexism.
85
If the global project of capitalism entails the specific exploitation of the female
gender,
86
then the oppression of a female worker in India stems from the same structural
inequalities of an oppressed female worker in South Africa, East and South East Asia,
Latin America, and the United States. Recognizing the asymmetrical relations of power
unevenness characteristic of Global Economic Development, Rai cautions that the
“increases in inequalities have also been accompanied by the decline of class-based
movements, which have suffered from a failure to recognize social exclusion based on
issues other than class.” While Rai sees the failure of dominant social movements to
recognize gender-based exploitation, she optimistically asserts that, “in this situation, allies
between women’s and other social groups, and solidarity among different emancipatory
social movements which expand the links between gender activism and…transformative
politics, become both necessary and more possible” (p. 216) [emphasis mine]. In this
sense, one of the messages we can take from Real Women Have Curves is that the
“common ground” of the global economy that Rai posits becomes “necessary and more
plausible” for an international women’s and social movement to develop. This is in
actuality possible through a critique of the racialized female body.
As a reflection of –and a creative response to—the shifting forms of economic,
political, and cultural oppressions faced by Chicanos in an era of late capitalism, Real
Women testifies to the ways in which citizen and denizen Latinas respond to everyday
social realities which are intimately tied to larger global processes.
87
For this reason
alone, this cinematic project is not a digression from the Chicano Film genre but rather, an
expansion of it, allowing and perhaps encouraging Chicanos and Chicanas to “expand the
links” of Chicano culture and social activism to inside and outside the United States. Real
Women not only provides an intermediate space where dialogue around globalization and
160

gender can continue, but as a globally released Chicano social document, it may also help
produce the popular impetus needed for an international and cross-cultural women’s and
peoples’ movement to begin and thrive.
161

ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1
See Gustavo Arellano “Real Cinemas are Controversial: Mexican Cinema’s Rise,
Chicano Cinema’s fall” in OC WEEKLY Vol. 8 No. 14 December 6-12 (2002).
http://www.ocweekly.com/2002-12-12/film/real-cinemas-are-controversial/ (web accessed
1/22/2003).

2
See Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture.
University of Minnesota, 1993

3
Robert Stam. Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000). p. 169.

4
Robert Stam. Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000). p. 170.

5
Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. (University
of Minnesota, 1993)p. xix

6
Ibid.

7
Ibid.

8
Real Women Have Curves (2002) directed by Patricia Cardoso, written by Josefina
Lopez, Luminarias (1999) written by Evelina Fernandez, and Tortilla Soup (2001) directed
by Maria Ripoll

9
Zoot Suit (1981) was directed by Luis Valdez, Born in East LA (1987) directed by
Cheech Marin, and Stand and Deliver (1988) directed by Ramon Méndez

10
Gustavo Arellano “Real Cinemas are Controversial: Mexican Cinema’s Rise, Chicano
Cinema’s fall” in OC WEEKLY Vol. 8 No. 14 December 6-12 (2002).
http://www.ocweekly.com/2002-12-12/film/real-cinemas-are-controversial/ (web accessed
1/22/2003)

11
Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. (University of
Minnesota, 1993).

12
Massey et. al., 1998; Rai, 2002

13
Joan Scott. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical
Review 91.5 (December 1986) p.1054.

14
See Vicky L. Ruiz “Texture, Text, and Context: New Approaches in Chicano
Historiography” in Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1986),
145-152.

162

15
See Vicky L. Ruiz “Texture, Text, and Context: New Approaches in Chicano
Historiography” in Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1986),
145-152.

16
See for example Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics Duke
University Press, 1996; Francis R Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman ed.
Tropicalizations Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, Dartmouth, 1997; Raul
Homero Villa Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture;
University of Texas, 2000; Marci McMahon Contested Geographies: Chicana Domesticity
as a Critical Discourse in American Literature and Culture, 1980-2003" (Dissertation,
University of Southern California)

17
Real Women Have Curves DVD Featurette.

18
See George Lipsitz “World Cities and World Beat: Low Wage Labor and Transnational
Culture.” Pacific Historical Review v.68 #2 (May, 1999) p 213.

19
From email conversation with Marilyn Atlas, one of Real Women Have Curves’
producers, Wednesday, March 3, 2004 11:52 AM.

20
Back Stage West, (October 17-23, 2002).

21
Moviehole. http://www.moviehole.net/reviews.php?reviewid=378 (Web Accessed,

22
Daily Variety (September 10, 2002)p. 4.

23
See Victor Valle, & Rodolfo Torres, Latino Metropolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2000

24
US Census Report 2000.

25
Hollywood Reporter July 31, 2002. (p.1,13). See also “HBO Films To Release 'Real
Women Have Curves' Theatrically Under Its Own Banner In Association With
Newmarket”
Time Warner Press Release (July 30, 2002). Web Accessed January 2, 2009. URL:
http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,669407,00.html.

26
Hollywood Reporter July 31, 2002. (p.1,13).

27
Ibid.

28
Ibid.

29
Ibid.

163

30
“Real Women Have Curves: Cast and Crew” Home Box Office Website
http://www.hbo.com/films/realwomen/cast/george_lavoo.html
(Web Accessed January, 2 2009).

31
Ibid

32
Ibid.

33
Ibid.

34
Hollywood Reporter, May 29, 2002 and Screen International (August 2, 2002)x. 1.

35
Screen International (August 2, 2002)x. 1

36
Ibid.

37
Daily Variety (July 31, 2003)x 2.

38
The Hollywood Reporter (August 2003)

39
Ibid.

40
Back Stage West Drama Logue Oct 17th, 2002. See also Screen International. No.1347
March 8-14 2002 (p. 8). The MPAA reported that in 2001 the Hispanic population proved
the heaviest movie goers with a per capita viewing of 9.9 films during the year and
representing 15% of admissions.

41
Hollywood Reporter July 31, 2002. (p.1,13)

42
Back Stage West Drama Logue Oct 17th, 2002. See also Screen International. No.1347
March 8-14 2002 (p. 8).

43
Daily Variety, July 31, 2003 (x 2).

44
Edna Bonacich & Richard Applebaum,. Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles
Apparel Industry. University of California, 2000.

45
Ibid.

46
Ibid.

47
See for example Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo,. Gendered Transitions: Mexican
Experiences of Immigration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. and Nora
Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla Seeking Community in a Global City Guatemalans
and Salvadorans in Los Angeles, Temple University Press, 2001

164

48
Ibid.

49
See El Norte directed by Gregory Nava (Independent Productions, Cinecom/Island
Alive, 1984)

50
Bonacich & Richard Applebaum, 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1993; Hamilton and
Chinchilla; 2001.

51
See James Loucky et. al. “Immigrant enterprise and Labor in the Los Angeles Garment
Industry” in Global Production The Apparel industry and the Pacific Rim. Edited by Edna
Bonacich et. al. (Temple University Press, 1994).

52
Bonacich & Richard Applebaum, 2000; Bonacich et. al., 1994.

53
See for example Mike Davis City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,
Vintage, 1992; and Victor Valle & Rodolfo Torres, Latino Metropolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2000.

54
Back Stage West Drama Logue Oct 17th, 2002

55
Bonacich & Applebaum, 2000.

56
Ibid.

57
Bonacich & Applebaum, 2000; p 16.

58
Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy. (Pine Forge Press, 1994).

59
Lipsitz, 1999.

60
Bonacich & Applebaum, 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Chinchilla & Hamilton, 1993

61
I am borrowing José David Saldívar’s term “hyperauthoritative treaty.” (Saldivar, 1997;
p18) He uses this term to describe the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a “text” that
legitimated US imperialist ideology and federal, state, and corporate ownership of territory
previously belonging to México. I am tweaking his term to include a gendered aspect and
also expanding the concept of the hyperauthoritative treaty from the treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo to now function as NAFTA, international free trade and globalization. In other
words to expand the concepts of the borderlands and what he calls “transfronterista contact
zones” to the rest of the world.

62
Bonacich, Edna et al.,1994.

63
Ibid. (350)

64
Ibid. (350)
165

65
Ibid. p. 3

66
Ibid.

67
Real Women Have Curves DVD, Special features: Spanish featurette

68
See for example Real Women Have Curves DVD, Special features: Audio Commentary
with Cardoso, Lopez and LaVoo. Speaking of their resistance to translate every Spanish
word into English or repeating every Spanish phrase with its English equivalent, Cardoso
and Lopez acknowledge that certain codified messages phrases were communicated only
to the Spanish speaking members of the audience.

69
See for example, Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (University of Minnesota
Press, 1994). For a Chicana-specific theorizing on space and gender see also Marci
McMahon “Domesticity, Citizenship, and (Trans) nationality: Theorizing ‘Domesticana’
in Rosario Castellanos and Las Comadres’ ‘La Vecindad’ and ‘Border Boda.”
(forthcoming).

70
Ibid.

71
See William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor ed, Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming
Identity, Space and Rights (Beacon, 1997). See also, Lisa Lowe Lisa Immigrant Acts: On
Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996).

72
Raymond Rocco, “Citizenship, Culture and Identity; Restructuring in Southeast Los
Angeles” In Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space and Rights (Beacon,
1997)p. 121.

73
Flores, Benmayor, “Constructing Cultural Citizenship” (ibid); 5

74
Quetzal. “This is My Home” in Worksongs (first track), Vanguard Records, 2003.

75
Artists reside in just west of the 110 freeway.

76
Interview with Quetzal Flores April, 2003. Through my conversations with Quetzal
Flores, one of the musical group Quetzal’s cofounder, he has explained that Quetzal’s 2003
album Worksongs was heavily influenced from their participation with the “Encuentro
Jarocho” Quetzal helped organize in Veracruz, Mexico.

77
Interview with Quetzal Flores April, 2003.

78
This is not to suggest that the domestication of the workplace is solely a revolutionary
practice or strategy for agency. The adverse is also true here. David Pellow and Lisa Park
have shown, for example, how the domestication of the workplace is also a strategy
utilized by employers to subjugate female workers in the workplace. See In The Silicon
166

Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech
Global Economy (New York, 2002).

79
See Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Ed., Crossings: Mexican Immigration and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives. Harvard University Press, 1998; p. 91

80
Lipsitz, 1999

81
Shirin Rai,. Gender and The Political economy of Development: from nationalism to
Globalization (Polity Press, 2002)

82
Rai, 2002.

83
Susan Bordo Unbearable Weight: feminism Western Culture and the Body (University
of California, 1993) p. 143.

84
Rai, 2002; Bordo, 1993.

85
Doreen Massey, "Flexible Sexism." In Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
(March, 1991)p.48, 56

86
Bonacich & Applebaum, 2000

87
See for example, Doreen Massey "Flexible Sexism." Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space (March 1991), Vo.9 No 1; p.48, 56 Sassen, Saskia Cities in a World
Economy. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1994 and Globalization and its
Discontents
167

CHAPTER FOUR: GLOBARRIOLOGY IN PRACTICE: “THE EASTSIDE
CAFÉ,” COMMUNITY, INDENTIY, AND CHICANO ACTIVISM IN THE 21
ST

CENTURY

This chapter explores the politics and cultural productions of “The Eastside Café,” a
collective of Los Angeles-based artists and activists founded at the turn of the twenty-first
century. “The Eastside Café” as an itinerant community becomes a vital site for examining
the ways in which this increasingly mobile group of people negotiates identities across and
between borders. Through the ways in which it provides a symbolic and physical public
place wherein which East Los Angeles residents to congregate, organize their
communities, and strategize how best to address what they perceive to be detrimental
effects of a neoliberal global agenda, the Eastside Café offers individuals and collectives a
direct relationship to the ‘globalization’ process. A singular example of how constituents
at the local level can be affected and influenced by larger processes associated with
globalization, “The Eastside Café” continues in the traditions of historic Latino social
organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and The
American G.I. Forum. “The Eastside Café” also illustrates what can happen when citizens
and residents negotiate political and cultural attachments to communities inside and
outside of the United States. Developed as a result of political and artistic collaborations
between Chicanos from Los Angeles and Mexicans from the southern state of Chiapas
during the mid 1990s, “The Eastside Café’s” rhetorical practices provide insight into how
abstract concepts such as neoliberalism and globalization resonate in the daily lives of its
members. At the same time, the cultural work produced by the Eastside Café’s members
suggests that Chicanos and Chicanas by the end of the twentieth-century began to forge a
transnational concept of cultural identity that deliberately challenged and actively moved
168

away from earlier nationalistic models. As explained in chapter one, I build upon Raúl
Homero Villa’s concept of “barriology,” in that I argue that the rhetoric, social activism,
and cultural work produced by the founders and members of “The Eastside Café” suggest a
paradigmatic shift turn in Chicano and Chicana cultural nationalism and social
consciousness. Illustrating an important shift from Chicano nationalism to what can be
considered a Chicano postnationalism, the Eastside Café provides an important case study
through which we may better understand the Chicano and Chicana experience at the end of
twentieth-century Los Angeles, and help us to delineate possible future contours Chicano
culture may take.
On Friday, May 17th, 2002, the city of El Sereno, an unincorporated predominantly
Chicano/Latino suburb in northeast Los Angeles, hosted the first “Eastside Café” event.
This collective was initially conceived of as a mobile community forum where residents,
community organizers, artists, civic leaders, and scholars could converge to empower their
respective communities. This loosely organized cohort was committed to provide the
physical space for East Los Angeles residents to engage in dialogue about salient issues
facing their neighborhoods. Condemning the Los Angeles cityscape as public space
deficient, “The Eastside Café,” held that the social interaction encouraged by public
squares can augment the citizenry’s political participation and help offset existing power
inequities. Additionally, “The Eastside Café” borrowed from late twentieth-century
Zapatista ideology, which maintained that autonomy and participatory democracy are
essential tools to enact social change at the local level.
1
Because of this, “The Eastside
Café” attempted to provide the public space necessary for East LA residents to congregate
and organize their communities in order to challenge what they perceive to be the
detrimental effects of a neoliberal global agenda.
2

169

In an effort to halt the California Transportation Authority’s (Cal Tans) proposed
expansion of the Long Beach Freeway, “The Eastside Café” commissioned the Mazatlán
Theater to provide a physical space wherein community-based political and cultural
collaborations could take place. This surrogate public square was envisioned as a place
where residents could communicate ideas and form strategies about local concerns, as well
as where local musicians, artisans, and visual artists could display and sell their work. The
Mazatlán Theater would also provide an opportune venue for invited public officials to
make appearances and provide an alternate arena where people could voice their concerns
over the actions and plans by Cal Tans.
Scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, George Lipsitz, David Held, Anthony McGrew,
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Mariela M. Páez, and Anthony D. King have argued that the
increasing mobility of capital, people, and ideas characteristic of our current era of
transnationalism and globalization problematizes the notion that culture and identity are
tied to a single place.
3
Concurrently, scholars such as David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and
Raúl Homero Villa have also found that the urban spaces of global cities are increasingly
becoming sites of social and political contestation between the haves and have-nots.
4

Noting how culture can function as a vital marker for changing dynamics in society, this
examination of a Chicano / Latino community organization and its respective cultural
productions in the global center that is Los Angeles from a comparative and international
approach, becomes vital for attaining more nuanced understandings of the ways in which
this increasingly mobile group of people negotiates identities across and between borders.
Cultural studies scholar George Lipsitz has argued that the triumvirate forces of
technology, globalization, and international migration have transformed cities such as Los
170

Angeles into global centers.
5
In addition to the particular sociopolitical and economic
characteristics of Los Angeles’s physical location, geography, and globalization, scholars
have suggested that assessments of the micro, such as community organizations and
individual identity, requires the need to understand space and place in relationship with the
macro, such as worldwide communications, time-space compression and convergence, as
well as international migration flows.
6
As such, the local struggles “The Eastside Café”
identifies and critically engages with can be understood as a response to LA’s political,
economic, and cultural redevelopment during a time of globalization, a time in which Los
Angeles is progressively becoming a global center while the local territory around this
megalopolis such as unincorporated East Los Angeles continues to be site of local
contestation. This examination of “The Eastside Café” will require that we recognize this
“mobile community forum” as promoting space and place as a fluid and continuous
process as a site of local contestation.
7
This conceptual framework will help to clarify how
the territory of East Los Angeles simultaneously functions as the physically defining place
for “The Eastside Café” as an organization, as well as a symbolic site for the globalized
social and cultural struggles of the Chicano Latino community. In short, “The Eastside
Café’s” philosophies, its concept of community, and the ways in which it deals with the
diverse struggles it attempts to address, provides insight into why space, or the lack
thereof, is fundamentally important to the political, economic, and cultural struggles of
Chicano / Latino East Los Angeles residents during an era of late capitalism.
After a brief historical background I will utilize a compilation of interviews with
Eastside Café founders and member participants, field notes from “Eastside Café” events,
and textual analysis of cultural productions produced by “Eastside Café” member artists, to
illustrate how this collective conceives of itself as a community organization, how it
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organizes socially and politically, and how the cultural productions presented at “Eastside
Café” events are both local reflections of and responses to larger processes associated with
globalization.

The Roots and Reasons for The Eastside Café
“The Eastside Café is not a place...It’s an independent state of mind”
8

Co-founded in 2000 by Roberto Flores,
9
at the time a doctoral candidate in
international education at the University of Southern California, “The Eastside Café” has
its roots in other local Chicano/Latino community organizations and struggles: the Unión
de Comunidades (Union of Communities), the Encuentro Chicano-Zapatista (the Chicano-
Zapatista Collective), and what “The Eastside Café” sees as the “continuing peoples
struggles from East Los Angeles” which include “police brutality, lack of affordable
housing, lack of access to higher education, unemployment, and gang violence.”
10
Unión
de Comunidades has its genesis as an organization of 24 students and activists from East
Los Angeles and local colleges such as East Los Angeles City College, The California
State University, Los Angeles, The University of California, Los Angeles, and the
University of Southern California. With the help of student organizations from the above
mentioned colleges and other East Los Angeles residents, Unión de Comunidades
successfully organized a Zapatista caravan from San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, to El
Zócalo, the main public square in Mexico City during the early summer of 2001. The
group had three goals for the caravan: 1) to document the march and communicate relevant
happenings to the East Los Angeles community; 2) to participate and contribute in the
peaceful pilgrimage; 3) and to lay the necessary foundation to establish a sister community
organization in the US between the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or the
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Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and Chicanos and Chicanas in East Los Angeles.
11
The
Encuentro Chicano-Zapatista developed out of collaborations between Chicanos and
Chicanas from East Los Angeles, other Chicano/a and Latino/a organizations across the
region and country, and Zapatista Chiapanecos from Chiapas, México. Their main
objective was to aid, in any way possible, the struggles of the Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional (EZLN) and educate Chicanos and Chicanas on the struggles facing
the Zapatistas and the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, México’s poorest state.
12

In the 2001, “The Eastside Café” developed out of the dialogue and combined efforts
of Unión de Comunidades and the Encuentro Chicano-Zapatista. Both of these groups
shared the goal of collectively organizing eastside communities where many of the
Chicano Latino artists active in Unión de Comunidades and the Encuentro Chicano-
Zapatista have their residences and where much of the “peoples’ struggles” mentioned
above are perceived to be located. As such, “The Eastside Café” takes into account the
political and cultural positioning of both organizations and its varying members and
constituencies. This heterogeneous development illustrates the differing ways in Chicanos
and Latinos form coherent if temporal organizations. The relatively flexible and fluid
characteristic of “The Eastside Café” as an organization not only allows it to constantly
adapt to changing internal and external dynamics, but it also falls in line with social theory
describing the nature of group affiliations at the turn of the 21st century. Andy Bennett
(2005), for example, has argued that contemporary youth cultural formations are temporal
and exhibit many of the qualities of “neotribes.”
13
Referring to the work of Michel
Maffesoli’s work, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society
(1996), he agrees that “late-capitalist society was characterized by new leisure and
consumer-based forms of tribal association.”
14
According to Maffesoli, the tribe “is
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without the rigidity of the forms of organization with which we are familiar, it refers more
to a certain ambience, a state of mind…”
15
As such, tribes have “replaced structural
categories such as class, gender, and race as sites of social bonding.”
16
Furthermore,
because “social identities are now more reflexive and pluralistic, individuals may identify
with and move between a number of tribes.” Because of this, Bennett argues that tribes
become more fragile and temporal groupings.
17

The Eastside Café: Goals and Conception of Community

“The Eastside Café aims to reconstruct and re-vision our communities through
self-help education, art, culture and dialogue.”
18

“The Eastside Café” conceives of itself as a collective community effort to apply
general concepts autonomy and participatory democracy vis-à-vis art and culture to the
material conditions that many of the Chicano and Latino communities of East Los Angeles
face at the turn of the 21st century. To accomplish this, “The Eastside Café” consolidates
ideas of resistance from the indigenous peoples’ struggle exemplified by the Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas Mexico, and deploys the creativity of the
local urban talent within its ranks in order to promote and disseminate its core values,
agendas, and objectives. Through this transnational process, “The Eastside Café” focuses
its theory and practice on addressing the everyday reality of the Chicano Latino
communities that dot the Eastside territory of Los Angeles. For example, Roberto Flores
claims that
Culture is a means of expressing the unique perspective that every
individual has. It is also a means of expressing through shared
understandings…Culture as abstract expression: music, poetry, dance,
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art etc. are also unique expressions coming from the individual but also
from the collective local… Because survival, resistance, and creation
are universal themes that unite all humans, the particular can have
resonance on a universal level. That is, the particular attempt to co-exist
with nature can be interesting, instructive, inspiring, and unifying to
others within the global setting.
19

Flores sees collective and individual, concrete and abstract culture as an important
component to “The Eastside Café,” as a way in which the local can have resonance on the
global level. In this sense, Flores understands culture as a way in which to address what
Sociologist and global theorist Roland Robertson (1992) found to be the central dynamic
of globalization: “a form of institutionalization of the twofold process involving the
universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism.”
20
While
Robertson explains globalization from a top-down perspective, Flores maintains that
culture and cultural productions can also function as a vehicle for agency. This critical
practice of utilizing local artistic talent and grassroots community organizing is what both
defines the central logos of “The Eastside Café” and firmly places this collective within the
traditional scope of Chicano self empowerment.
Raúl Villa also found that Chicano cultural production in post World War II Los
Angeles developed forms of “discursive intervention by which Chicanos critiqued, with
increasing aesthetic sophistication, the instrumentality of dominant spatial practices in
marginalizing their communities.”
21
Similar to Edward Soja’s argument that, like history,
geography is an important category in the construction of the social world, Villa employs
cultural studies founder, Raymond Williams’ contention that geography is not simply a
theoretical topic, but that it is also grounded in the everyday lived reality. As Villa
reminds us, Williams argued that “when attachments to urban working class milieus are
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mediated in literature, they embody a particular ‘structure of feeling’ that derives its
urgency and affective force precisely as such places are displaced or threatened with
erasure under the pressures of capitalism’s ceaseless restructuring of space…”
22
This
concept of the importance of artists and cultural productions to the community is
strategically deployed to address many of the salient social issues “The Eastside Café”
communities face. As such, the Chicano cultural productions emanating from “The
Eastside Café” also developed “discursive interventions” through which Chicanos and
Chicanas critiqued the global power structures which they feel marginalize their local
communities.
Reflecting on the deterioration in health services, access to education, affordable
housing, and social services, combined with an increase in labor exploitation and a general
decline in the quality of life for Chicano / Latino and African Americans in Los Angeles,
Flores maintains that
It wouldn't be a leap of faith on anyone's part to view the role of elected
officials as middlemen/women brokering the minority communities to
the highest bidder… In these communities, you don't have to convince
people that their government has abandoned them.
23

Flores claims that although the number of Latino and Latina elected officials in Los
Angeles and at the national level has increased during the last twenty years, many
predominant Latino communities across the US are still economically and physically
deteriorating.
24
His view runs counter to the praise that the increase of Latino and Latina
elected officials at the local, regional, and national level has stimulated with some
prominent Latino organizations.
Two reports conducted by the National Association of Latino Elected Officials
(NALEO), have praised the increase of official political Latino representation. For
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example, NALEO found that between 1996 and 2010 Latino representation at the federal
level increased from 17 to 24 or 41.2%, at the state level the number of Latino and Latina
elected officials grew from 156 to 245 or 57.1%, while the number of Latino elected
officials at the county level grew from 358 to 563 or 57.3%. The NALEO reports claim
that
The growth in the number of Latino elected officials in the United States is one
sign of the political progress of the Latino population. This progress is due partly to
the increasing ability of the Latino community to translate its population growth
into increased political participation. Initiatives to mobilize Latino voters and
promote their engagement in the political process have contributed greatly to the
growth of the Latino electorate.
25

Regardless of NALEO’s findings and in spite of the familial, cultural, and political
connections many Latino elected officials have to their respective communities, Flores
claims that the unprecedented increase in Latino political representation at the local, state,
and federal levels, in and of itself, does not translate into progress for the Chicano/Latino
community at large. Thus, while many Latino politicians and political organizations praise
the progress Latinos have made in attaining political representation, many Chicano /Latino
communities across America continue to struggle with historic social, political, and
economic disenfranchisement.
26
Mike Davis predicted the possible election of a Latino
Mayor to Los Angeles. The campaign against and the eventual defeat of former speaker of
the California State Assembly and native son of East Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, in
the 2001 Los Angeles Mayoral contest, suggested that the historic issues surrounding race
continued to play a significant role in Los Angeles politics.
27
It would not be until the
2005 Mayoral race that Villaraigosa would win the office defeating incumbent James
Hahn. Villaraigosa’s election did not automatically translate into progress for the
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Chicano/Latino communities of Los Angeles, however. Agreeing with Flores’ critique
and views for social change, Mike Davis warned that "only powerful extra-electoral
mobilization, with the ability to shape agendas and discipline candidates, can ensure
representation of grassroots...interests."
28

Flores claims that this “third-worldizing” of US Latino communities is due in part to
processes tied to globalization. He believes, for example, that the progressive deterioration
of Latino neighborhoods is “[d]irectly related to current global neoliberal governance
which systematically attacks the welfare state through policy that encourages welfare cuts,
corporate downsizing, open and runaway shops, wage restructuring, union busting, etc.”
29

In this dismal reality Flores describes he also sees an impetus for an autonomous
community approach in community organizing and conceptualization. It is these negative
sociopolitical structural shifts that he sees as creating the conditions “for the development
of an autonomy attitude and approach,” a critical tactical response similar to Michel
DeCerteau’s notion of “tactics” in his important work The Practice of Everyday Life where
the individual at the street level, although unable to completely escape the dominant social
condition under which s/he finds him/herself, can be “on the watch for opportunities that
must be seized ‘on the wing.’” Thus, the individual becomes the most adequate starting
point for social action and spatial practice.
30

The “The Eastside Café”: Autonomy
“The Eastside Café” understands autonomy and autonomy building not only as
methods and means of struggle for social justice, but also as a method whose long-term
goal is the development of a “different type of nation-state, as a critical process for social
change whose long-term goal is a fundamental change in social reality.”
31
Flores view
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complements Roland Robertson’s view that globalization involves the "conjunction of
different forms of life," it comprises the set of dynamic relationships among four core
units—societies, international system, individual selves, and humankind as a whole.
32
For
Robertson, this conjunction is best expressed in the interaction between actors or groups
holding different views of the world order of which the four main components of this
"global-human circumstance" in which nation-states, the system of societies, individuals,
and humankind denote societalization, internationalization, individuation, and
generalization of consciousness about humankind.
33
Like Robertson, Flores sees these
points of reference as simultaneous, overlapping, and interacting with one another which
destabilize any single definition of each.
Flores defines the characteristics of an autonomous community and/or organization
as being asset-based and consisting of interdependence, inter-subjectivity, expansiveness,
participatory democracy, and reflecting the notion of accompaniment. Flores defines an
autonomous organization to be “an interdependent grouping of individuals, households in
the same neighborhood, or organizations that collectively struggle to survive materially,
culturally, spiritually, and psychologically.”
34
While admitting that complete
independence is unrealistic, Flores sees autonomy as a critical response to “the dependency
that capitalism created and neoliberalism reinforces.”
35
Fully realized, he claims that an
autonomous community would be interdependent in its relationship between and amongst
other communities, yet autonomous from the government and its agents. As Flores
understands it, “interdependence would lean a little more on the dependence side between
communities [while] autonomy leans toward the independence side in terms of government
and its agents.”
36
In this regard, Flores’ notion of an autonomous community is not one of
complete separation from larger governmental institutions, but one that is more politically
179

inclusive, especially between local neighborhoods and community institutions. As such,
“The Eastside Café’s” view of autonomy allows for multiple points of views to be
incorporated into the struggle for community empowerment as well as for the struggles
faced by the local community to be contextualized through larger sociopolitical realities
stemming from processes of globalization.

“The Eastside Café” & The Global Now
Arjun Appadurai’s theoretical emphasis on metaphors and cultural representations
can be useful to examine “The Eastside Café’s” interconnections between ideology,
principles, people-hood, politics, and culture. Arjun Appadurai attempts to conceptualize
the global from the perspective of the local, a focus of “The Eastside Café.” Through the
lens of what he refers to as the “Global Now,” he explores the impact of globalization on
everyday worlds and how popular imagination is transformed within the context of a
globally embedded everyday life.
37
Similar to the Eastside Café’s approach toward
autonomy and community organization, Appadurai argues that a new political and
theoretical imagination is needed in order to make sense of the effects globalization
exercises on people's lives. His notion of the five “global cultural flows" provides a model
with which we may examine how “The Eastside Café” conceives of community and how
the cultural productions performed at their event are both reflections of and responses to
larger processes associated with globalization. Appadurai’s theoretical approach to
globalization and culture, his conceptualization of the five “global cultural flows," provides
the necessary context under which we may view and examine Chicano and Chicana
cultural expressions at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century.
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An analysis of the music and visual art presented at the Eastside Café and the methods by
which this group communicates with its diverse and dispersed membership provides
insight into its inner workings as a community organization. This examination is an
adequate way to illustrate Appadurai’s concept of the five “global cultural flows” which he
defines as Ethnoscapes, Mediascapes, Technoscapes, Ideoscapes, and Financescapes (see
Chapter 1).
Let me remind the reader that Appadurai sees Ethnoscapes as referring to the
landscapes inhabited by human groups that are constantly on the move. These groups
include immigrants, refugees, and tourists. Mediascapes are produced by what he calls the
mass `mediatic' systems and products such as newspapers, magazines, film, and the
internet which disseminate information at a global level. Technoscapes to Appadurai
refers to the landscapes dominated by the diffusion of both mechanical and informational
technologies around the world while Ideoscapes refers to the landscape of political
ideologies and imagery associated with a particular state or social movement. And
Financescapes, form the transnational nature of economic relations created by the
increasing flow of capital.
“The Eastside Café”: Ethnoscapes, Mediascapes, Ozomatli and Quetzal:
The bands Ozomatli and Quetzal are among a group of local Los Angeles-based
musical groups which co-founded “The Eastside Café.” They are recognized and
respected within the native and immigrant Chicano Latino community of East Los
Angeles. Ozomatli’s and Quetzal’s socially conscious and genre blending music have
gained them both critical acclaim and worldwide popularity. Ozomatli, Nahuatl for the
Mexica deity of music and dance, has opened for world renowned acts such as Los Lobos,
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and Mexico’s Santana, Maná and Jaguares during tours in the US, Mexico, and Europe.
Quetzal, Nahuatl for a long plumed bird the Mexica revered, has been invited to music and
cultural festivals in Mexico and Cuba on numerous occasions, and they have opened for
bands such as Los Lobos, Mexico’s Julieta Venegas, and Columbia’s Aterciopelados in
tours across the US and different countries in Latin America. Additionally, Quetzal has
also toured Japan with other Chicano bands and artists. Ozomatli and Quetzal have also
collaborated with musicians in other countries and have a strong and loyal following in
Los Angeles where both groups are based.
38

In line with Chicano musical tradition, the lyrical tropes utilized by both bands call
for autonomy and participatory democracy, as well as conjure images of immigrants,
refugees, nomadic individuals, and their need for social justice. Using the everyday
experiences of leftists, immigrants, and ethnic minorities as inspiration, their music calls
attention to the political struggles of oppressed peoples from around the world. Ozomatli’s
and Quetzal’s music critically addresses the plight of human groups, (Appadurai sees them
as dislocated both physically and symbolically), in an effort to raise social consciousness
and provide a political remedy through the medium of popular music.
Emerging from the burgeoning Chicano Latino underground music scene of Los
Angeles, Ozomatli and Quetzal are part of the continuing tradition of Chicano musical and
cultural history which dates back to the 1940s. Ozomatli and Quetzal, however, are also
products of contemporary sociopolitical happenings such as the downtown Peace and
Justice Center (PJC). This now defunct nonprofit downtown community cultural arts
center was financially supported for the period of one year in 1995 by the City of Los
Angeles, as the result of a labor dispute between the Chicano/Latino workers of the
182

Emergency Resources Unit and the Los Angeles Conservation Corps.
39
The Peace and
Justice Center was known for hosting local benefit concerts for progressive issues as well
as conducting arts and cultural workshops for the local communities during its brief
lifespan. The first event held at the Peace and Justice Center was a 1995 fundraiser
featuring Ozomatli. At the time, Ozomatli was named “Todos Somos Marcos” (We Are
All Marcos) after the sub-commander of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in
Chiapas, Mexico, and had personal and political ties to the Revolutionary Communist
Youth Brigade.
40
As such, Ozomatli’s first public performance was both to inaugurate the
Peace and Justice Center and to raise money for the Revolutionary Communist Youth
Brigade’s cause.
The local struggle with the Los Angeles Conservation corps was the impetus for the
formation of the Peace and Justice Center which provided the space necessary for Ozomatli
and Quetzal, as well as other local bands such as The Blues Experiment, Ollin, and the
Black Eyed Peas to perform and develop their craft.
41
Although the Peace and Justice
Center had a short lifespan, the acts that it helped to produce and the performances it
showcased had a tremendous impact on the local Chicano Latino cultural and music scene
in Los Angeles and influenced the development of other cultural arts centers such as Zack
de la Rocha’s the “People’s Resource Center” in Highland Park and the arts collective
“Arts in Action” space in downtown Los Angeles.
42

183

(Figure 3) Raul Pacheco of the Grammy Award winning musical group Ozomatli at
the first “Eastside Café.” Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke used with permission.
43

Comprised of musicians from a variety of ethnic backgrounds Ozomatli, was
somewhat of an anomaly when they emerged from the Los Angeles underground music
scene in 1995.
44
Incorporating Mexican musical folk forms such as the ballad, ranchera,
and corrido, Afro-Latin rhythms, Dominican merengue, Columbian cumbia, Cuban salsa
and rumba, Jamaican reggae, traditional Indian music, with politically engaged lyrics,
Ozomatli’s musical style has been described as a “contemporary marker of the distinctions
of Los Angeles-based Chicano music.”
45
As Josh Kun noted back in 1998, “Ozomatli
were their own urban groove monster: an unmistakable product of post-riot Los Angeles
who take party-rocking so seriously that it becomes new school musical activism.”
46

Similar to Ozomatli, Quetzal is also influenced by traditional Mexican musical forms as
well as by contemporary Chicano culture. Named after the Aztec god of culture, Quetzal’s
music not only crosses the musical borders between the US genres of rock and soul, and
the regional Mexican styles of Jarocho from Veracruz, Huasteco from Tamaulipas,
Corridos from the north, Rancheras from the south, and urban Boleros, but the mostly
Chicano band also crosses the physical borders that separate the nation-states from which
these particular musical genres emanate. Their musical repertoire also symbolically and
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discursively challenge the essentialized, nationalistic, and sexist threads tied to traditional
notions of Mexican cultural nationalism and the Mexican musical genres mentioned above.
Taking both of these bands’ social and political geneses into account, it is not
surprising that members of both bands would cofound and collaborate with “The Eastside
Café.” Aside from sharing political views and living within proximity to each other, for
example, all have directly and indirectly worked and collaborated with members of the
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas, México. The band Quetzal, for
example, has even co-authored songs with the Zapatistas. One of these cross-border
musical collaborations, is entitled “Todos Somos Ramona” or “We are all Ramona” which
is both a tribute to the indigenous woman leader of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional as well as a response to Ozomatli’s original namesake of Todos Somos Marcos
which identified the band with the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional’s eloquent
male sub-commander Marcos.
47
A reading of the songs “Lo Que Dice” (What he Says) on
Ozomatli’s 2001, Grammy Award winning CD Embrace the Chaos, and “Vagabundo”
(vagabond) on Quetzal’s 2002 Sing the Real, are two discursive instances that help us
envision Appadurai’s notion of Ethnoscapes and Mediascapes.
Their bilingual hip-hop cumbia fusion track “Lo Que Dice,” for example,
communicates some of “The Eastside Café’s” fundamental philosophical notions of
grassroots organizing, embracing of differences, and non-violent social struggle against
multinational corporations (MCs).
Now I be damned if I sit on my ass
While these MC's trespass cross my grass
Time to landscape, reshape the garden for growth
Spread the message overseas via remote
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We got different types of flavas but they taste the same
All biters, no writers in this hip hop game
I blame myself plus you for things we do
It's no wonder why we stay under and don't bust through because

We trek this battlefield life
With words to sleigh the doubters, expect no knives
It's only common sense the heart is more revealin'
But a stab to someone's back is much more appealin'
Through their lyrical criticism of MCs (microphone conductor), Ozomatli summarizes
“The Eastside Café’s” approach to community organizing through participatory
democracy. In essence, “time to landscape, reshape the garden for growth” exemplifies
“The Eastside Café’s” notion of “rooting oneself into the local” as a strategy to resist the
hegemony of multinational corporate capital and enact social change by “reshaping” the
community or “the garden” for change/”growth.” Here, Ozomatli represents the
community / garden as the local environment. As such, reshaping the garden / community
for growth entails organizing / landscaping the community / garden for social change.
The lyrical rendition of “I’ll spread the message overseas via remote,” also brings
to mind processes of globalization such as the creative uses of advancements in
telecommunication technologies. Social media sites like “Friendster,” “MySpace,” and
“Facebook,” have since their inception in the late 1990s and early 2000s sometimes
functioned as cultural, political, and economic conduits through which individuals from
different parts of the world could forge alliances on a symbolic and practical level.
Furthermore, the musical performances by Ozomatli, Quetzal, and other musicians and
poets at “Eastside Café” events were broadcast on local radio station 97.4 FM Pacifica
186

Radio (popularly known as KPFK FM) which helped communicate many “Eastside Café”
events to greater Los Angeles, larger regional southern California areas, and any visitors to
website which streams broadcasts on a daily basis. In Ozomatli’s song, “Lo Que Dice,”
the message that is to be “spread overseas” is facilitated by the “remote,” what Appadurai
would call a mass mediatic system or the “Mediascape” which refers to
the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate
information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios,
etc.), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests
throughout the world; and to the images of the world created by these media.
48

Appadurai reminds us that these images of the world can involve differing nuances
depending upon on their mode, hardware, audience, and the interests of those who own and
control them. However, “[w]hat is most important about these mediascapes is that they
provide (especially in television film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of
images, narratives and 'ethnoscapes' to viewers throughout the world, in which the world
of commodities and the world of 'news' and politics are profoundly mixed.”
49
In this
particular case, the image of the world Ozomatli articulates vis-à-vis their music in general,
and the song “Lo Que Dice” in particular, is filtered through their musical style and context
which is documentarian, educational, as well as entertaining, the hardware they utilize to
communicate their message is also mediated by their live performances, radio broadcasts,
videos and information on sites such as YouTube and social media sites such as MySpace
and Facebook, and CD distribution, their wide audience includes attendees at “Eastside
Café” events, listeners of KPFK FM and other radio stations, concert goers, consumers of
Ozomatli CDs, and global visitors to their website www.ozomatli.com. Ozomatli’s music,
their performances and collaborations with “The Eastside Café” illustrate how the
187

relationships among flows of peoples, technologies, and information animate global
cultural systems.

(Figure 4) Martha Gonzalez, lead vocalist for the musical group Quetzal at first
“Eastside Café.” Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. Used with permission.
50

Quetzal’’s song “Vagabundo” provides a more explicit example of the plight of
human groups under a neoliberal global project. In this particular narrative, Quetzal offers
a characterization of an individual who is physically and symbolically dislocated from the
local society, yet the musical group also contextualizes the scenario within a larger global
perspective.
Filthy Vagabond carries his trash bags as if they were filled with gold.
"Who will buy from me?"
"Free art and life lessons straight from my own experience!"
Vagabond searches through trash.
Everything to him is of value.
188

He owns and owes nothing.
Creatively, he labors.
51

In this song the filthy vagabond represents the most common human condition under
global neoliberalism.
52
One need only look at humanitarian reports to realize that half of
the world, over 3 billion, lives on less than 2 dollars a day.
53
The narrative begins with its
description of the vagabond who is dirty, filthy, and does not work. These familiar initial
words lead listeners into a musical journey aimed at challenging the popular discourse
favoring the dismantling of the welfare state, limiting public assistance programs, and
blaming the victim. According to Roberto Flores’ reading of Quetzal’s “Vagabundo,”
To the Neoliberal Project the Vagabundo doesn’t produce goods for the
market, doesn’t buy from the market and doesn’t sell to the market.
Since producing, buying and selling are the defining activities in a
market-centered economy, the Vagabundo, the poor, the homeless, the
landless are trash. In Javier Eloriaga’s words ‘"the Indigenous [like the
Vagabundo] is a zero to the left [of a period]."’
54

Here, the Vagabundo is the humane artist/actor/citizen, an individual who finds value in
what consumer society considers garbage, waste, worthless. The vagabundo’s mission, his
work, and his labor under neoliberalism become salvaging trash as an act of self-
liberation.
55
This localized act of personal resistance has global precedence when one
contextualizes the action of salvaging what gets discarded with the fact that 20% of the
population in developed nations consumes 86% of the world’s goods, while the rest of the
world’s population barely has enough to purchase 14% of those goods.
56
Quetzal’s
musical narrative illustrates how the vagabundo’s daily activity, his/her everyday spatial
practice, his/her counter-consumption narrative of salvaging and recycling in an era of
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mass consumption and environmental destruction can be seen as local resistance to global
realities, as a personal testimonial to what the music group Quetzal calls “the real.”
In the title track of Quetzal’s 2003 release “Sing the Real,” the first-person lyrics of
this hybridized rock musical composition questions particular characteristics of the
community in order to come to a more inclusive self-deterministic understanding of self.
To make sense of me I look to community
Subconsciously shaping my ideology.
I look to the errors of my people
To solidify the me I want to be

This active questioning and reconceptualization of the personal through the collective, is
consistent with one of the steps “The Eastside Café” identifies as necessary to achieve
community autonomy. As Roberto Flores states:
The first step towards autonomy is to change the way we look at ourselves.
To change that feeling of powerlessness that has developed under a
capitalist system. To give ourselves permission to determine our own
destiny by making [our own] decisions which affect our everyday lives.
57

“Sing the Real,” then, also represents an active reworking of traditional individualist
ideology by the racialized other at the same time that it questions the traditional
heteronormative submissive positioning of females in general, but of Mexican American
women in particular. Focusing on the oppression of the racialized female other, Quetzal’s
song symbolically acknowledges and responds to what Shirin Rai and others have argued
about the gendered nature of globalization and of global oppression, namely that processes
of globalization such as production and new technologies are marginalizing the power of
some while also enhancing the power of others.
58
Additionally, Rai found that global
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oppression is “a highly gendered process. To ignore the multi-level, interrelated character
of struggles over power, even in poor, marginalized communities is…to misunderstand
empowerment in our increasingly interconnected global/local world.”
59
Quetzal’s
“Vagabundo” and “Sing the Real” is better understood using Appadurai’s notion of
ethnoscapes through its narration and representation of the nomadic individual, or
vagabond, and the racialized female other.
Another important aspect of Quetzal’s music is their conception of it as public art.
This view hints also at Appadurai’s notion of Mediascapes, of mediatic systems which
disseminate information on a global level. Influenced by the art and philosophy of the late
Mexican Muralist Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros, and consistent with “The Eastside Café’s”
notion of compensating for absent public space on the eastside’s geography, Quetzal
adheres to the notion that “the mission of all great art is to encourage humanity to struggle
to reach a future of real happiness.”
60
Quetzal also realizes, however, that the individual or
group artist can also become emblematic of the community as whole. For this reason the
artist, the production of art, and the art itself should not take the community for granted but
should be accountable for who s/he is, how the art is produced, and the degree to which the
artwork relates, represents, and/or resonates with the community:
The social relevance of public art,
Is in your mind again.
Accountable to whom
is where we begin.
Sing the real.
61

The fact that Quetzal’s advocacy of public art also takes shape through a compact disc and
mp3 audio file format, illustrates Appadurai’s notion of mediascapes. Both the compact
disc and the mp3 file are compatible and can be played on a global level—to a global
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public—through the radio, television, and through the internet via a computer,
smartphones, and other mobile devices. Thus, they take advantage of existing global
mediatic systems. Here, Quetzal’s message compensates for the lack of public space by
transcending the geography through radio and internet play.

Mediascapes, Graffiti, “Nuke” and “Mellow”:
“The Eastside Café is an interactive cultural real-life magazine that in its
interaction with the community features and encourages liberating notions of who
we are.”
62

Among “The Eastside Café’s” members are two local graffiti artists, “Nuke” and
“Mellow,” who produced artwork on the exterior northwest wall of the Mazatlán Theater
on Eastern Avenue in the El Sereno neighborhood of East Los Angeles at the first
“Eastside Café” event held May 17
th
2002. Born out of collaboration between the owner
of the Mazatlán Theater and “The Eastside Café,” and the graffiti artists, the spraycan
mural with the words "Comin’ Soon to the Barrio,” mirrored the polyvocal dialogue
occurring inside the walls upon which “Nuke” and “Mellow” exercised their first
amendment rights and wielded their spraycan skill. In line with “The Eastside Café’s”
philosophy, the production of the piece was organized as a response to a sociopolitical
economic agenda which they understood to be inhibiting the social mobility and
interactions within and between local communities and their respective culture.
63
In this
respect, the wall upon which the mural was painted became a public canvas, a visual and
vertical public square, a space where the voice of the community could be projected.
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(Figure 5) "Comin 2 da Barrio. Culture 4 the Masses."
Mural artists Nuke (right) Mellow (center) with Roberto Moreno, the great-grand
nephew of Cantinflas (featured on the right in the mural, Charlie Chaplin on the left) at
first “Eastside Café” event. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. Used with permission.
64

By appropriating the imagery of iconic comedic figures from both American and
Mexican popular culture, “Nuke” and “Mellow” created a mural or as they referred to it, a
“piece and community announcement”
65
entitled "Comin’ Soon to the Barrio.” The
spraycan mural which works as a billboard to strategically project a message to the
community, depicts two giants of comedy and cinema from the US and Mexico, Charlie
Chaplin and Mario Moreno "Cantinflas," respectively. With this piece the artists
simultaneously articulated their view that, although the local people and culture of the El
Sereno neighborhood of East Los Angeles may be Chicano / Latino, much of the “cultural
‘props,” or the cultural recognition and respect, go to non-Latino and non-Chicano cultural
icons.
66
As NUKE explained:
I just got [paperwork] from cultural affairs...this whole thing on murals,
on rules and regulations. Some of it is wacked
67
….And you know why
there's opposition to this kind of stuff?…Because a lot of it is
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cultural…C'mon, [We're] comparing Cantinflas--putting him on the
same level--with Charlie Chaplin…People would not see [Cantinflas]
unless we put him up [on murals]. How often do you see Latinos on
walls, much less honored for their contributions to society?
68

In line with “The Eastside Café’s” notion of autonomous communities, “Nuke” recognizes
the need to take it upon himself to represent an aspect of his community’s culture in his
own way. Thus, “Nuke’s” work provides a critical counter-narrative to the heavy Latino
presence on billboards promoting alcohol and tobacco products, and of stereotypical
images of Latinos on film and television. “Nuke’s” co-creation counters the mainstream’s
negative and all too familiar images by visually commenting on the ways in which Latinos
are acknowledged and represented in the mass media. But, similar to the message
articulated through Quetzal’s song “Sing the real,” “Nuke” provides an alternative vision, a
“solidified” version of the “he” wants to see.
The mural can also be read as the superimposition of the community’s voice upon
the physical geography. “Comin’ Soon to the Barrio” provides a visual testimonial to what
the musical group Quetzal’s refers to as “the real,” to the everyday reality of the
community. As “Mellow” stated “I might get a job at Cultural Affairs. But I want to work
there because I want to open doors [for other artists] and not have all these rules and
regulations…To just be on the real, you know?"
69
[emphasis mine]. “Mellow’s” point of
view can be seen as a metaphor for the mural she co-authored. Her direction as an artist
and community activist lead her to recognize that employment at Department of Cultural
Affairs, which was originally formed in 1925 as the Municipal Arts Department and whose
goal it is to fulfill Los Angeles’ responsibilities in the arts including managing 22
community arts centers, and part of the official government structure that “Nuke” found to
be partly wacked, is one of the necessary steps members of the “The Eastside Café”
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consider in order to change a department that has been criticized for inhibiting the creation
of the art “Mellow” professes in.
70
Her willingness to cross the threshold of the office that
for a long time would rather paint over Frank Romero’s (1984) "Going to the Olympics"
rather than have him repair it. According to Romero, it would have been cheaper for the
city to pay him to repair "Going to the Olympics" rather than paying four city workers for
twenty hours of labor to cement over it. “Mellows” tenacity parallels her keenness in
placing the community’s voice upon the walls of the city.
71
In this sense, infiltrating the
system to make it more relevant to the communities it is supposed to serve becomes
synonymous with enhancing the walls of the urban geography by turning them into a
localized mediatic system to better represent the voices and culture of the community
while disseminating it to the larger urban geography via passersby on foot or car.

Technoscapes, “The Eastside Café,” and the Internet:

(Figure 6) Flyer for the fourth “Eastside Café” event

The work of “The Eastside Café” also incorporates the use of landscapes dominated
by the diffusion of both mechanical and informational technologies around the world.
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Roberto Flores recognizes, for example, that the growth and success of “The Eastside
Café” has been due in large part to its ability to instantly communicate across a large
geography. This can be seen through “The Eastside Café’s” aggressive use of the internet,
specifically the use of mass emails, “Eastside Café” listservs, and websites to communicate
with its growing membership across southern California. As Flores states:
The Eastside Café has already reached the greater LA area and parts of
Central California. The event that is being worked on right now [The
Eastside Café Four: Descendents of the Earth] is connected to many
people from the Oxnard, Santa Barbara and Ojai areas. One of our best
sources of communication is the internet.
72

Much of the dialogue that helps to produce the physical events takes place and shape in
cyberspace through email conversations. Choosing a physical location for “Eastside Café
Four: The Descendents of the Earth,” the fourth “Eastside Café” event, for example,
required the constant input from various individuals across a large geography, from Ojai to
El Sereno, from Oxnard to East Los Angeles. Thus, the internet played a major part in
helping alleviate the difficulties of instant communication between “Eastside Café”
members across a large swath of southern and central California.
“Eastside Café” founding bands Ozomatli, Quetzal, and Slowrider have also used
the internet both as a site for the diffusion of their respective band and performance
information, but also to voice political views, post community information and events, and
to seek opinions on global issues such as the War in Iraq. Upon my first visit to
Slowrider’s website in March, 2003, for example, I noticed how a viewser (viewer + user)
could not log on to the site without reading the banner on the index page which read
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“STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ.” Additionally, the banner also displayed the following:
QUESTION OF THE WEEK:
Which countries is the U.S. planning to attack after Iraq?
Post your answers on the message board

Slowrider’s site not only posts opinions on world events such as the 10 year War in Iraq
but also prompts the viewser to register their opinion and get involved with the political
system through his or her laptop, desktop computer, or from a public computing center.
Similarly, when a viewser visits the sites for Ozomatli and Quetzal she or he can not only
read information specifically related to the respective band but can also read and be
directed toward information regarding political and social issues affecting not only East
Los Angeles or the United States but the rest of world.
73

Media and Communications scholars have argued advances in telecommunication
technologies have offered new tools for and possibilities for individuals across to social
spectrum. Mizuko Ito, et. al. have argued, “unlike the early years in the development of
computers and computer-based media, digital media are now commonplace and pervasive,
having been taken up by a wide range of individuals and institutions in all walks of life.”
74

Indeed, as can be noticed across the American landscape, for example, it very well seems
that digital media, in many of its incarnations, is utilized by blue collar workers, students,
home keepers, civil service workers, civic leaders and even the president of the United
States.
75
Yet, not only heads of state have been so intimate in with their mobile devices.
By the end of the twentieth-century, many groups and individuals have been aggressively
and creatively utilizing advances in media and communication technologies for a myriad of
purposes. In Los Angeles, California, the second largest media market in the world,
Chicano and Latino students, immigrants, and workers across the social spectrum have
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been innovatively utilizing advances in media and telecommunication technologies in
everything from staying in touch with relatives across the US/Mexico and in other parts of
Latin America, to organizing for social change. Examples such as these, Mizuko Ito and
other media scholars claim, illustrate how advances in communication technology have
“escaped the boundaries of professional and formal practice, and the academic,
governmental, and industry homes that initially fostered their development.”
76
As such,
they find that these technologies have now been taken up by diverse populations and non-
institutionalized practices, including the peer activities of youth.
77

As with other social groups across America, Chicanos and Chicanas in late
twentieth century Los Angeles visited and became members of social networking sites
such as MySpace. Their participation and discussions within these social networking sites
provide important venues where ideas about identity and politics are played out and put up
for discussion. As Dara N. Byrne has found, internet forums such as these become a locus
of community vitality and their discussions provide recorded instances of discourse
production.
78
Indeed, for Chicanos interested in participating in a myriad of discussions
ranging from where to eat and where to attend meetings in support of the Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas, Mexico, all they needed to do was ask
members by posting a thread or a question on sites such as “LatinoLA,” “MySpace,” or
belonging to a listserv specifically created for that purpose. As Byrne argues sites such as
these become central to public life because they offer members and participants the unique
opportunity to react and respond to many relevant and racially specific topics.
79

One such instance where this technological innovation has been exemplified is with
Chicano underground Hip Hop / Rap artist and “Eastside Café” cofounder “Olmeca.”
“Olmeca” was born in the city of Los Angeles but has traveled across the border
198

throughout his life and this migration has helped shape his world view and music. In the
video for “Batalla,” the lead track for his debut solo album Semillas Rebeldes for example,
features a narrative about a young Mexican urbanite, “Ozcar” who receives a phone call
informing him that his brother had been deported from the United States for being an
illegal immigrant. Ozcar decides to organize a protest. He goes to his desk, sits down and
designs a flier on paper and then on his computer. Afterward, Ozcar walks out the door
takes the bus to the local internet café, inserts his flash drive into a computer and Googles
“Leyes imigrantes” or immigration laws. He is linked to and looks at several sites
including the text to House of Representatives Bill “HR 4437.”
80
He then sends an email
with the subject line stating: “Apoyo a los hermanos Latinos!!” attaches the flier he
produced at home and sends the email to an undisclosed number of email addresses. A
young Mexicana who is online in another internet café in another part of the city opens the
email and downloads the flier which reads “Peaceful March on May 1
st
2006”. She heads
to the local print shop and prints multiple copies of the flier. We then see that she and one
of her friends walk the streets to distribute fliers.
It is important to note that Olmeca was in residence in Mexico City while working
on the album Semillas Rebeldes. Like many Latinos across the Americas and the United
States he was well aware of U.S. congressman Sensenbrenner’s Immigration Reform Bill
HR4437 largely through the use of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook,
and Twitter. In fact, Latino/a, Chicana/o youths’ utilization of cell phones and the social
networking site MySpace by was thought to have contributed to the success of the massive
protests against HR 4437 held across the country and Latin America. Oscar de la Hoya, in
his annual “Cinco de Mayo” boxing bout even wore a bandana which read “No on HR
4437.”
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The two protagonists in the video communicate with each other over the Internet,
develop a flier to inform people about a protest march scheduled to take place in el Zócalo,
in the federal district of Mexico City and then print out the flier at an internet café to
publicly distribute. Batalla’s lyrics are relevant to the film’s narrative structure:
A battle against the system of the beast
David and Goliath
Aunt versus a Mammoth
This is the situation as it now presents itself
Our words, this is my weapon
Aim and shoot until victory
…
Our battles are against the system
Not with our brothers and sisters
Hip Hop!
The battle don’t stop
To the beast, your rap is your gun
81

Olmeca calls for pan Latino unity by asserting that “la batalla” or “the battle” is with “el
sistema de la bestia” or “the system of beast” and thus not “contra el hermano hermana”
not with your brother or sister.” Olmeca frames this epic battle by making an analogy with
the obvious asymmetrical power relations between an ant and a mammoth, “hormiga
contra mammoth,” with the biblical story of “David and Goliath.” Olmeca claims that it is
“our word” or the “palabra nuestra” that in his view becomes “nuestra arma” or an
armament in such a lopsided fight. Similar to how David slays Goliath by carefully and
calculatingly aiming his sling, Olmeca, paying homage to Latin American revolutionary
hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s famous battle cry, “Hasta La Victoria! Siempre!,” orders us
to aim and shoot “y hasta la victoria.” Unlike Che, however, what is being aimed here are
200

not guns or mortars but words and rhymes as Olmeca state to the hormiga: “your rap is
your gun.” The process displayed in the video and the message the song communicates to
listeners falls in line with the larger Chicano discourse of resistance and affirmation at the
end of the twentieth century.
Ideoscapes, Indigenousness, and Slowrider:
Slowrider’s music is also representative of a landscape of political ideology and
imagery associated with the indigenous peoples’ movements around the world in general
but especially in Anahuac, Aztlán, and East Los Angeles. Similar to Ozomatli and
Quetzal, this prolific band is a product of local alternative sociopolitical and cultural arts
collectives in Los Angeles and is also influenced by traditional musical modes of México,
yet more in its lyrical tropes than musical styles.
82
Although this blending of styles and
transnational influences resonates in contemporary Chicano cultural sensitivities, there is
also a historical precedent for this type of work. In The Borderlands of Culture: Américo
Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary Ramón Saldívar, for example, argues that
Américo Paredes’ journalism for both the US military’s Pacific Stars and Stripes and for
Mexico’s Mexico City Daily El Universal, offered a unique bilingual chronicle of
America’s shift from continental expansion to overseas empire at the dawn of
globalization. To Saldívar, Paredes was more than a proto-Chicano, he was also a
precursor to the new American Cultural Studies because of his ability to notice the in the
local the ramifications of larger transnational processes.
83
According to Saldívar, Paredes’
work helped to document the dawn of globalization and the emergence of the transnational
new world order.
84
It can be said that this new transnational world order that members of
“The Eastside Café” both address and negotiate within their “culturally affirming” artistic
201

and spatial practices as they attempt to carve out, as Raúl Villa would state, a “near order
within a far order.”
85

Utilizing a polyvocal musical genre, Slowrider addresses global issues through the
sonic localities of Hip-Hop, Rap, Cumbia, Salsa, and Rock. Because of this mixture,
Slowrider succeeds in constructing an audible and multifaceted public square in which
individuals can hear a critique of reality, but also dialogue and challenge it. Slowrider’s
use of indigenous imagery and influences in their music and performances is in line with
the use of Zapatista ideology in the founding of “The Eastside Café’s” principles and
philosophies. In “Mexica Xicano Connexcion” (Meh-shee-kah Shee-Kah-noh
Connection) for example, Slowrider’s testimonial to mother earth illustrates ancient
indigenous ideology but also connects it to contemporary social struggles between
Anahuac and Aztlán:
It all began with a light from the four corners
And that’s where we found ourselves, together, repaying mother earth for life
We shall never ask for than you willingly give
Her love reaches from the full moon to the evident power
of the people at the top and bottom of the continent

Come / Go / You too can feel her beauty in your mind /
From the indigenous sports in La Venta to the ceremonies of Chichen Itza /
Our bodies encompassed the multiple unions of points to reach the level of the
galaxies

A northward wind directs us to our native land called Aztlán
There is where we find the habitants
The color of Brown,
The color of resistance,
The color of your blood
202

Working together to form social organizations to better society
86

In this song, Slowrider sociohistoricizes the plight of the people living in the region of the
southwest by referring to their initial and historic ties to the land. The line “We found
ourselves, together, repaying mother earth for life” refers to the indigenous people’s
religious and agricultural tradition of viewing their existence within the context of the
environment. Additionally, Slowrider paints this scenario by also illustrating that this is
now where we “find the habitants the color brown, the color of resistance, the color of your
blood, working together to form social organizations to better society.” Olmecas’ lyrics
and use of indigenous, Mexican, and Chicano tropes also pay homage to and is in reinforce
the work of Chicana poets and scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes
which describe a Chican@ political and cultural sensitivity spanning, or bridging the
US/Mexico border. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s “The Homeland, Aztlán / El Otro México” for
example she very clearly deploys tropes of Mexican indigenous sensitivities with her own
Chicana Feminist subject positioning.
This land was Mexican once
Was Indian always
And is.
and will be again.

Yo soy un puente tendido
Del mundo gabacho al del mojado
Lo pasado me estirá pa’ trás
y lo presente pa’ ‘delante
87

By utilizing indigenous philosophies to contextualize the sociopolitical positioning of the
southwest’s inhabitants and by hinting that the struggle of this group of people is historical,
203

continuous, Olmeca’s music and lyrics also articulate a landscape of political ideology that
spans the US/Mexico border and an ideoscape that stretches across time and space.

Financescapes and the ESC:
As a not for profit organization “The Eastside Café” does not fully incorporate and
integrate systems of cross border capital flow into their everyday practices. As individuals
however, some threads are visible. To a lesser degree, the work represented by the musical
members of “The Eastside Café” is also symptomatic of the transnational texture of
economic relations created by the increasing flow of capital movements. Both Quetzal and
Slowrider, for example, have their music produced by Vanguard Records, a label with a
reputation of producing alternative cutting-edge urban music and of producing art of profit.
Additionally, like many documented and undocumented immigrants have done for
decades, members of “The Eastside Café” have utilized electronic money transferring
through systems such as Western Union to donate monies to indigenous communities in
Mexico as well as to help support members of the 2001 Zapatista Summer caravan.
More in line with “The Eastside Café” philosophies and practice is a personal
narrative that artist graffiti artist “Nuke” communicated to me during a recent interview.
Providing a counter-narrative to the dominant cross border capital flows initiated by the
North American Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and other processes of
globalization, Nuke” described a trip he took to Mexico City upon receiving an invitation
by a Mexican progressive arts collective to participate in a anti-corporate arts festival.
Since the group had little to no funding available to purchase him a flight from LA, NUKE
resorted to raising the funds himself by doing odd jobs and commissioned work.
204

Man…I ended up getting a ride to TJ by my uncle, catching a bus to
Michoacán and then taking another one to DF…Those dudes were poor
but they are doing important work and are on the real so I didn’t mind
taking the trip.
88

It is narratives such as this that I feel represent the nexus of the Eastside Café philosophy
and practice. “Nuke’s” political and cultural commitment to participate in an arts festival
in another country regardless of the fact that he lacked funds exemplifies “The Eastside
Café” grassroots initiative approach to organizing. Similar to “The Eastside Café,” “Nuke”
took (and at the time of this writing continues to take) the cross border trip in order to
collaborate and engage with his counterparts on the other side of the border and build cross
border relations. Creating a mural depicting the common cause between Chicanos,
Latinos, and Méxicanos on the wall of a community venue in Mexico City, he placed the
perspective of an East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights community native with his chilango
Mexican counterparts and symbolically extended the public square, or plaza, from Los
Angeles to el Distrito Federal.
This chapter showed how nascent urban collectives in East Los Angeles, such as
“The Eastside Café,” are vital in augmenting what we know about the ways in which
Chicanos and Latinos conceive of community and organize for social change during the
turn of the twenty-first century. Developed as a result of political and artistic
collaborations between Chicanos from Los Angeles and Mexicans from the southern state
of Chiapas during the mid 1990s, “The Eastside Café’s” rhetorical practices and cultural
productions provide insight into how abstract concepts such as neoliberalism and
globalization resonate in the daily lives of its members. The cultural work produced by the
Eastside Café’s members suggests that Chicanos and Chicanas by the end of the twentieth-
century began to forge a more inclusive concept of cultural identity that deliberately
205

challenged and actively moved away from earlier nationalistic models. A singular
example of how constituents at the local level can be affected and influenced by larger
processes associated with globalization, “The Eastside Café” continues in the traditions of
historic Latino social organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens
(LULAC), and The American G.I. Forum. “The Eastside Café” also illustrates what can
happen when citizens and residents negotiate political and cultural attachments to
communities inside and outside of the United States. The rhetoric, social activism, and
cultural work produced by the founders and members of “The Eastside Café” suggest a
paradigmatic turn in Chicano and Chicana cultural identity and social consciousness.
Illustrating an important shift from Chicano nationalism to what can be considered a
Chicano postnationalism, “The Eastside Café” provides an important case study through
which we may better understand the Chicano and Chicana experience at the end of
twentieth-century Los Angeles, and help us to delineate possible future contours Chicano
culture may take.
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ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1
The Zapatistas take the name and continue the work of the great Mexican Revolutionary
leader Emiliano Zapata. Zapata (8.8.1879 – 4.10.1919), was a mediero (sharecropper) and
horse trainer born in Anenecuilco, Morelos. After he conscripted into the army for seven
years and attaining the rank of sergeant, he became president of his village council. There,
he campaigned for the restoration of village lands confiscated by hacendados (ranchers).
Between 1910 and 1919, Zapata continued his armed fight for land and liberty, promoting
his Plan of Ayala which called for the seizure of all land taken from villages, confiscation
of one-third of all land held by "friendly" hacendados and full confiscation of land owned
by persons opposed to the Plan of Ayala.

For a concise Chronology of the Zapatistas also known as the Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional (EZLN) see Joshua Paulson Chronological History of the Dialogue
between the EZLN and the Mexican Government, 1994-1998
http://www.ezln.org/archivo/fzln/timeline.html

2
See “Autonomy and Participatory Democracy: An Ongoing Discussion on the
Application of Zapatista Autonomy in the United States an Interview of Roberto Flores
and Greg Tanaka” by Peter McLaren International Journal of Educational Reform, Vol.
10, No. 2 (Spring 2001).

3
Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University
of Minnesota Press, 1996); George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger
(University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Lipsitz, “World Cities and World Beat: Low Wage
Labor and Transnational Culture.” Pacific Historical Review vo. 68 #2 (May 1999)p 213;
David Held and Anthony McGrew, Ed. The Global Transformation Reader: An
Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Polity, 2000); Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, and
Mariela M. Páez, Ed. Latinos Remaking America, (University of California Press, 2002);
Anthony D. King, Ed. Culture Globalization and the World System: Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

4
David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change Blackwell, 1989; Saskia Sassen Cities in a World Economy. (Pine Forge Press,
1994);
4
Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature
and Culture. (University of Texas Press, 2000).

5
See Lipsitz, “World Cities and World Beat: Low Wage Labor and Transnational
Culture.” Pacific Historical Review vo. 68 #2 (May 1999)p 213; Saskia Sassen Cities in a
World Economy. (Pine Forge Press, 1994).

6
David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change Blackwell, 1989; Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, and Mariela M. Páez, Ed. Latinos
Remaking America, (University of California Press, 2002); George Lipsitz, American
Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

207

7
See Edward Soja “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination” in
Human Geography Today Edited by Doreen Massey, John Allen, et.al.. (Polity Press,
1999)

8
Taken from the Eastside Café document “The Eastside Café Is…” The set of goals listed
on this document were compiled from the responses given at an Eastside Café meeting
held on Dec 2002.

9
Flores was awarded a 1996/97 Fulbright Fellow to Chiapas, Mexico, to study the role of
women leaders, particularly the senior women, in creating and sustaining the Zapatista
movement. Through his knowledge gained through his research and through the work of
“The Eastside Café” Flores is interested in constructing one of the first autonomous
communities in the United States.

10
Taken from “The Roots and reasons for the Eastside Café.” According to “The Eastside
Café,” “the continuing peoples’ struggles from East Los Angeles” includes issues like
police brutality, lack of affordable housing, lack of access to higher education,
unemployment, gang violence. “The Eastside Café” sees these issues as historical and
continuous.

11
Taken from the Eastside Café document “The Roots and reasons for the Eastside Café”

12
Taken from “The Roots and reasons for the Eastside Café.” See also, Rodolfo Acuña,
Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (Verso, 1996).

13
Andy Bennett, “Subcultures or Neotribes: Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth,
Style and Musical Taste” in Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee, Ed. The
Popular Music Studies Reader. (Routledge, 2005)p. 96.

14
Ibid.

15
Ibid., p. 109

16
Ibid., p. 96.

17
Ibid.

18
Taken from the Eastside Café document “The Eastside Café Is…” The set of goals listed
on this document were compiled from the responses given at an ESC meeting Dec 2002.

19
From fields notes and interview conducted with Roberto Flores on April 5
th
, 2003.

20
Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage,
1992)p. 102.

208

21
Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and
Culture. University of Texas Press, (2000) p. 17.

22
Ibid., p. 12-13.

23
Ibid.

24
See Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres Latino Metropolis (University of Minnesota
Press, 2000); See also Mike Davis City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles
(Verso, 1990); Magical Urbanism, Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (London and New
York, Verso Press, 2000).

25
The National Association of Latino Elected Officials “Profile of Latino Elected Officials
in the United States and their Progress Since 1996” (NALEO Educational Fund, 2010)
http://www.naleo.org/downloads/DirecSummary2010B.pdf (web accessed 7/10/2011).

26
See the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) reports “2010
Census Profiles California” (NALEO Educational Fund, 2010)
http://www.naleo.org/downloads/CA_Census_2010_Profile_fin0311.pdf (web accessed
7/10/2011) and “Profile of Latino Elected Officials in the United States and their Progress
Since 1996” (NALEO Educational Fund, 2010)
http://www.naleo.org/downloads/DirecSummary2010B.pdf (web accessed 7/10/2011).

It is important to note that many Latino elected officials come from working class
communities and /or are sons and daughters of immigrants. The parents of the president of
the Los Angeles City Council in 2000, for example, came from a small town in
Michoacán, Mexico.

27
A Los Angeles Times article mapped the voting patterns by district. The graph that
illustrated the voting patterns for Jim Hahn was placed next to a graph illustrating the
voting patterns for the infamous Proposition 187. They were almost identical. What can
be characterized as “white” and “black” sections of Los Angeles county, voted for Hahn
and proposition 187, while the Latino or “brown” sections of the city voted for
Villaraigosa and against Proposition 187.

28
Mike Davis Magical Urbanism, Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (Verso Press,
2000)p. 142.

29
See Peter McLaren “Autonomy and Participatory Democracy: An Ongoing Discussion
on the Application of Zapatista Autonomy in the United States an Interview of Roberto
Flores and Greg Tanaka” International Journal of Educational Reform, Vol. 10, No. 2
(Spring 2001).

30
Michel DeCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press,
1988)p. xix.
209

31
McLaren, Ibid.

32
Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. (Sage, 1992)p. 27.

33
Ibid., Robertson, "The Globalization Paradigm: Thinking Globally." in Religion and
Social Order. (JAI Press, 1991) p. 215-16.

34
McLaren, Ibid.

35
Ibid.

36
This is not to be misconstrued as a separatist framework. Although Flores sees
autonomous communities as interdependent, “Interdependence” represents the
community’s dependence between/amongst other communities. Autonomy, on the other
hand, represents independence from the official government and its agents but not
completely severed from it.

37
Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University
of Minnesota Press, 1996)

38
Ozomatli has opened for bands such as Santana, Los Lobos, and Mexico’s Maná and
Jaguares during tours in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Quetzal’s music has not received
the attention it deserves from major US labels or the American mainstream (at least not at
the time of this draft), their music, however, is admired by other countries around the
world. They have, for example, been invited to music and cultural festivals in Mexico and
Cuba on numerous occasions, and have opened for bands such as Los Lobos, Mexico’s
Julieta Venegas, and Columbia’s Aterciopelados in tours around the US and Latin
America. Additionally, Quetzal has toured Japan with Japanese urban artists interested in
Chicano culture. More recently, and perhaps a bit ironically, Ozomatli has been hired by
the US State Department to promote the diversity and tolerance of American culture.

39
See Victor Viesca, “Straight Out the Barrio: Ozomatli and the Importance of Place in the
Formation of Chicano/a Popular Culture in Los Angeles” Cultural Values 4 No.4 (2000)p.
445–473 see also Viesca, “The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o
Music in the Greater Eastside” in The American Quarterly 56.3 (John Hopkins University
Press, 2004)p. 719-39.

40
Ibid.

41
Ibid.

42
Ibid.

43
This photo was taken by Nic Paget-Clarke of “In Motion Magazine” it features Raul
Pacheco of the Grammy-Award winning Los Angeles based musical group Ozomatli.
210

Pacheco attended the first “Eastside Café” (May 17, 2002). This photo was taken while
Pacheco moderated an audience discussion with the band Quetzal in the Mazatlan
Ballroom in El Sereno neighborhood, Los Angeles, California.

44
Ibid. See also Josh Kun “Around the World in L.A.: The Anomalies of Ozomatli” in
Colorlines Vol. 1 No. 2 (Oct 31, 1998)p. 38.

45
Ibid.

46
Ibid. Kun

47
See track nine on Quetzal’s self-titled debut album. Son del Barrio Records 2000.

48
Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” Public
Culture Vo. 2 no. 2 (1990)p. 9.

49
Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” Public
Culture Vo. 2 no. 2 (1990)p. 9.

50
This photo of Martha Gonzalez, vocalist for the musical group Quetzal was taken by by
Nic Paget-Clarke of In Motion Magazine during the first “Eastside Café” event (May 17,
2002). Gonzalez cofounded “The Eastside Café” and attended and performed at the first
event. This photo was taken during Quetzal’s performance in the Mazatlán Ballroom in El
Sereno neighborhood, Los Angeles, California.

51
See Roberto Flores “Lo que’l Vagabundo Significa Para Mi, What The Vagabond
Means to Me” In Motion Magazine, April 24, 2002
(http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/vaga.html) web accessed 10/15/2005.

This translation from the Spanish lyrics was provided by Roberto Flores Ph.D. in “What
The Vagabond Means to Me” and article he authored in In Motion Magazine in April
2002.
A scholar himself (at the time Flores was a Doctoral student at the University of Southern
California), Flores provides both a translation of the lyrics and an analysis of Quetzal’s
song in both Spanish and English. It is also important to note that Flores is the father of
Quetzal Flores, founder of the group Quetzal and has closely collaborated with the musical
group on many occasions not the least of which were “Eastside Café” events and events
related to the Encuentro Chicano Zapatista. As such, Flores has both familial and political
connections with Quetzal and is also invested in the social and political issues the musical
groups champions. Because he has also collaborated with Quetzal Flores has a little more
insight than most fans and critics about the process by which the musical group has
developed their craft over the years.

211

52
See Global Issues, Homepage “Causes of Poverty”
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp (Web Accessed 10/15/2002).

53
Ibid.

54
Ibid. Roberto Flores “Lo que’l Vagabundo Significa Para Mi, What The Vagabond
Means to Me” In Motion Magazine, April 24, 2002
(http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/vaga.html) web accessed 10/15/2005.

55
Ibid.

56
Ibid. Global Issues, Homepage (2002)

57
From email interview April 2003

58
See Shirin M. Rai, Jane Parpart, Kathleen Staudt. “(Re)defining empowerment,
measuring survival” University of Warwick, UK. Paper prepared for ‘Workshop on
Empowerment: Obstacles, Flaws, Achievements’ 3-5th May, 2007, Carleton University,
Ottawa, Canada

59
Ibid.

60
See Stein, Philip. Siqueiros: His Life and Works. New York: International Publishers,
1994. Pg. 194

61
Quetzal. “The Social Relevance of Public Art” in Sing the Real (Vanguard, 2006).

62
Taken from the Eastside Café document “The Eastside Café Is…” The set of goals listed
on this document were compiled from the responses given at an ESC meeting Dec 2001.

63
Onsite interview with “Nuke” and “Mellow” at the first “Eastside Café” event held
May17
th
2002. This is how “Nuke” and “Mellow” referred to their mural as they were
painting it.

64
This is a photo of "Comin 2 da Barrio. Culture 4 the Masses" a mural painted by two
local graffiti artists “Nuke” and “Mellow.” The photo was taken by Nic Paget-Clarke and
features Cantinflas on the right side of the mural and Charlie Chaplin on the left. In the
picture are mural artists “Nuke” (right), “Mellow” (center), and Roberto Moreno (left), the
great-grand nephew of Cantinflas. The mural was created May 17, 2002 on an outside
wall of the Mazatlan Ballroom in in the neighborhood of El Sereno, Los Angeles during
the first “Eastside Café” event.

65
Ibid.

66
Ibid.

212

67
In this particular context the term wacked can refer to pointless, stupid, or fucked up. It
is a term which signifies when something is not favorable or positive.

68
Onsite interview with “Nuke” and “Mellow” at the first “Eastside Café” event held May
17
th
2002.

69
Ibid.

70
See “Inside Cultural Affairs” website http://www.culturela.org/aboutcad/history.html
(web accessed 10/23/2006).

71
Romero’s mural was commissioned by the City of Los Angeles in preparations for its
hosting of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. It is located on the North bound lane of the
101 fwy immediately after Alameda St and is currently being restored by the artist.

72
Interview with Roberto Flores conducted on April 5th, 2003.

73
See for example Ozomatli’s website http://www.ozomatli.com/; Quetzal’s website
http://www.quetzalmusic.org/; Slowrider’s website http://www.slowrider.com/

74
Ito, Mizuko et al. “Foreword." Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media.
Edited by Anna Everett. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on
Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. vii–ix.

75
It was noted by many news papers across the country and CNN that president Barack
Obama was having a difficult time “letting go” of his “Blackberry” Smartphone because it
was literally and figuratively “attached to his hip.”

76
Ito, Mizuko et al. p. vii

77
Ibid.

78
Byrne, Dara N. “The Future of (the) ’Race’: Identity, Discourse, and the Rise of
Computer-mediated Public Spheres." Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital
Media. Edited by Anna Everett. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. p. 15.

79
Ibid.

80
House of Representative Bill HR 4437, or the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and
Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 was introduced to the 109
th
congress on Dec 6,
2005 by U.S. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. of Wisconsin’s 5th District. It
passed the House but was never voted on in the Senate. This bill received a lot of media
coverage mostly by pro immigrant rights and human rights activists. For more information
visit: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-4437

213

81
This is my English translation of the original Spanish. Original version is as follows:

Una batalla contra el sistema de la bestia
David and Goliath
hormiga contra mammoth
Esta es la historia hoy que se presenta/
Palabra nuestra esta es mi arma/
Apunten y disparen y hasta la Victoria/
…
Las batallas son contra el sistema
No contra el hermano hermana
Hip Hop!
La batalla don’t stop
a la bestia tu pistola tu rap

82
Olmeca, the rapper and MC for Slowrider, for example is a former student of Liemert
Park’s “Project Blowed.” “Project Blowed” is a Hip-Hop educational seminar held
Thursday nights from 10pm - 2am.at 4343 Leimert Blvd. Founded in 1994 by
independent recording artists Aceyalone and Abstract Rude, and hosted by Ben Caldwell
(formerly of I-Fresh) and J-Smoov, “Project Blowed” offers artistic improvement and
cultural freedom for many youth in the area. The program also conducts music production
and business practices workshops to teach entrepreneurship and marketing for emerging
artists.

83
Ramón Saldívar. The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the transnational
Imaginary Duke University Press (2006).p. 10.

84
Ibid. p. 51.

85
Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and
Culture. University of Texas Press, 2000; 235.

86
My English translation of the original Spanish.

87
Gloria Anzaldúa “The Homeland, Aztlán / El Otro México” in Aztlán: Essays on the
Chicano Homeland By Rudolfo A. Anaya, Francisco A. Lomelí. (El Norte
Publication/Academia University of New Mexico Press, 1998) p. 191-93. See also, Lorna
Dee Cervantes “Poema Para Los Californios Muertos” in Emplumada (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1981)p. 42.

88
Telephone interview with “Nuke” February 2003. See also Daniel Hernandez, “Mural
or Graffiti? City Draws Line: L.A. is cracking down on wall art, ordering businesses to
redo or remove works” The Los Angeles Times (August 25, 2005)
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/aug/25/local/me-mural25 (web accessed 10/13/2005).
214

CONCLUSION: CHICANO THERAPY IN THE 21
ST
CENTURY

(Figure 13) Registration poster for “Revolution and Resistance: A Conference on the
State of Chicana/o Art and Activism”

On February 6
th
2003, The University of California Riverside hosted a three day
conference entitled “Revolution and Resistance: A Conference on the State of Chicana/o Art and
Activism.” There were many notable artists and scholars registered to present their art and their
scholarship. There was a lot of excitement about this conference in particular because its aim
was to “bring together noted scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways art and activism
are connected, and have always functioned together in the culture” as Emory Elliott, Director of
the UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society stated.
1
Scheduled panelists, artists and activists
included scholars such as George Sánchez, Susana Chavez-Silverman, George Lipsitz, Maria
Elena Fernandez, Yolanda Broyles Gonzalez, Olivia Chumacero of “El Teatro Campesino,” Raul
Villa, writer and performer Josefina Lopez, Tomas Benitez of Self Help Graphics, artist Alma
Lopez, performance artist Luis Alfaro of the Latino Theater Initiative, and Harry Gamboa of the
legendary art collective ASCO. There would also be live performances by satiric comedy troupe
215

“The Chicano Secret Service,” and legendary Chicano rockers Los Illegals, and a keynote
address by Cherrie Moraga. Due in part to the list of presenters and to the positive nature of this
cross-disciplinary conference, it was a surprise to everyone when members of the UC Riverside’s
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (M.E.Ch.A.) interrupted the conference with a protest
to the conference itself, and a demand for an autonomous department of Chicano Studies, and a
rally against what they felt was the university’s plan to incorporate an “Amerikkkan Studies”
model of ethnic studies.
2
Voices were raised, fists were raised to the ceiling, tears were shed
over lunch, and the keynote address was also interrupted. “Chicano Therapy is thriving.” I
thought.
Of particular interest for the Mechistas was the opening panel to the conference. The
inaugural presentations were conducted in a panel entitled “Presentations by American Studies
scholars from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.” Some of the student protesters felt
insulted that the very first panel at a “Chicano” conference was conducted by what they called
“the oppressors” from Spain. Additionally, a group of Mechistas walked over to verbally harass
and accuse George Sánchez, former president of the American Studies Association and director
of the University of Southern California’s Program in American Studies and Ethnicity of “selling
out” and of trying to turn UC San Bernardino’s Ethnic Studies department into “Amerikkan”
Studies. As they stood over George Sánchez, pointing fingers and gesturing defiantly the
Mechistas didn’t realize that the person they were verbally attacking was George Lipsitz as the
real George Sánchez egged them on. Pointing at Lipsitz, Sánchez boldly stated “and he’s not
even Chicano!”

216

Under the detrimental effects globalization and the neoliberalization, global theorist and
historian Masao Miyoshi sees the “function of the university is being transformed from state
apologetics to industrial management…a radical reduction of its public and critical role.”
3
In
this scenario, one of the responses by underfunded universities and colleges is to house different
area studies under one umbrella department where tensions between and within disciplines have
emerged. The work of Chicano and Chicana artists and activists who articulate their respective
struggles with globalization in creative ways should inform us that the avenue the “mechistas”
(members of Me.Ch.A.) forcefully carved out when they “crashed” the “Revolution and
Resistance” conference at UC Riverside in 2003, is not only symptomatic of a Chicano “Moment
of Danger,” as Lipsitz might say, but this forced conversation is also a disciplinary moment of
aperture. As Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal might say, this is also an opportunity to
take stock and asses what we need to academically address in our current midnight hour in the
first tenth of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the contours the repositioning of
Chican@ studies in a global world may take is also a political discussion Chican@s and anyone
interested in Chicano politics and culture needs to have. Because the role of any single nation
state in constructing identity is increasingly being brought into question in an internationalized,
transnationalized, and globalized world, we should also consider the potential implications of a
single disciplinary rubric under which American studies, Chicano studies, or other disciplines
may become un/comfortably positioned. Resisting the temptation of solely considering the
mechistas’ actions an example of what Paul Giles might understand as an “expression of
discontent with the ways in which American Studies as a subject has conceptualized itself in
relation to existing systems of knowledge”
4
we should also view it as an alternate call to action
done in part by the active remapping of our positionalities in order to meet new challenges,
5

217

whether they derive from state oppression vis-à-vis globalization or disciplinary tensions through
the neoliberalization of the University. If there is one thing that we can learn from Chicano and
Chicana cultural productions and artists and activists such as Culture Clash, Quetzal, Ozomatli,
Slowrider, Olmeca, and community organizations such as “The Eastside Café,” and also
including and the mechistas’ autonomous Chicano studies advocacy, it is that we need to rework
and find creative ways to augment Frantz Fanon’s notion that international consciousness lives
and grows in the heart of nationalism to something like “American studies lives and can grow in
the heart of Chicano studies, or Asian American studies, or African American studies, or Native
American studies.” As Giles suggests though, the trick is to allow the reciprocity between
American studies and other area studies, to establish a dialogue whose “paratactical divisions
involve not the ideological demystification” of one over the other but rather to “allow for [their]
radical aestheticization.”
6
Similar to the ESC, we need to envision American Studies, and I
would also add Chicano Studies, as a “virtual discipline” through which we can disrupt the “self-
enclosing boundaries” of area studies and academic disciplines by and through projections of
dislocation and difference.
Due in part to the unplanned events that transpired at the “Revolution and Resistance: A
Conference on the State of Chicana/o Art and Activism” event at UC Riverside, it is clear to me
to now as it was apparent to me in the mid 1990s, that there is an ongoing intergenerational
debate between and within Chicanos and Chicanas relating to the ways in which we should
respond artistically and academically to the political climate. What counted as “Chicano art,”
what was “authentic” Chicano and what was and is “Chicano-approved,” “Chicano-certified,” or
“Aztlán-Select” as one of my contemporaries once jokingly stated, is and has been open for
debate.
7
The question continues to be however, “Who gets invited to the discussion?” In
218

retrospect, this personal anecdote on “Chicano Therapy” illustrates how some of the cultural
fault lines between Chicano artists and activists were also symptomatic of the larger societal
debates on the viability of identity politics and nationalist rhetoric in Chicano art and popular
culture and questions the usefulness of nationalism in our current struggle for self determination
and social justice. As in the past, identity politics would be an issue that divided Chicano and
Chicana artists and activists as well as how scholars write about Chicanos and Chicano culture
and identity.
219

ENDNOTES TO CONCLUSION

1
“UC Riverside Center for Ideas and Society Hosts Chicano Art and Activism Conference
Music, Film, Theater, Readings and Lectures Scheduled Feb. 6 through 8” UC Riverside
Newsroom (January 29, 2003) http://newsroom.ucr.edu/324 (web accessed 5/15/2005)

2
My notes from the event. See also Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands Edited by
Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia (Indiana University Press, forthcoming)

3
See “Globalization Culture and the University,” in The Cultures of Globalization Frederick
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi Ed. Duke University Press, 1998; p.247-63

4
Paul Giles "Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of
Exchange," American Quarterly, Vo. 50, No. 3 (September)p. 525.

5
Raul Homero Villa. Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture.
(University of Texas Press, 2000)p. 233.

6
Paul Giles "Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of
Exchange," American Quarterly, Vo. 50, No. 3 (September)p. 544.

7
From conversation I had with Lalo Licón winter of 2011.

220

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228

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Discography

Various Artists, MexAmérica (Angelino Records, 2001).

Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine (Epic, 1992).

Jill Scott, Experience: Jill Scott (Hidden Beach Records, 2001).

Bob Marley & the Wailers, Legend: The Best of Bob Marley & The Wailers
(Polygram, 1990).

Quetzal Worksongs (Vanguard, 2003).

Quetzal, Sing the Real (Vanguard, 2000).

Slowrider Nacimiento (Da Volada, 2002).

Aztlán Underground Sub-Verses (D-3 Entertainment, 2001)

Unpublished Musical Sources

Aztlán Underground, “Palestine” (unpublished song used with permission from
Yaotl Mazahua).
229

Filmography

American Me (Universal Pictures, 1992) directed by Edward James Olmos, written
by Edward James Olmos, Desmond Nakano.

American Pastime (American Pastime, Rosy Bushes Productions, Shadow Catcher
Entertainment, T&C Pictures, 2007) directed and written by Desmond Nakano.

Black Moon Rising (Sequoia Productions, New World Pictures, 1986), Directed by
Harley Cokliss, Screenplay John Carpenter, Story by Desmond Nakano

Body Rock (New World Pictures, 1984), Directed by Marcelo Epstein, Screenplay
Desmond Nakano

Born in East LA (Clear Type, Universal Pictures, 1987) Directed and Written by
Cheech Marin.

Boulevard Nights (Warner Bros., 1979) Directed by Michael Pressman, Written by
Desmond Nakano.

East L.A. Marine: The Untold True Story of Guy Gabaldon (Fast Carrier Pictures,
2008) Directed By Steven Jay Rubin, Narrated by Freddie Prinze Jr.

El Norte (Independent Productions, Cinecom/Island Alive, Public Broadcasting
Service, 1984) Directed by Gregory Nava Written by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas.

Fukkatsu no hi (Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Haruki Kadokawa Films,
1980), Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Screenplay by Kôji Takada and Kinji Fukasaku.

Real Women Have Curves (HBO, New Market, 2002) directed by Patricia Cardoso,
written by Josefina Lopez.

Last Exit to Brooklyn (1990) Directed by Uli Edel, Based onn Novel by Hubert
Selby Jr. Screenplay by Desmond Nakano

Luminarias (Sleeping Giant Productions, 1999) Directed by José Luís Valenzuela,
Written by Evelina Fernandez

Stand and Deliver (Olmos Productions, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1988) Directed by
Ramón Menéndez, Written by Ramón Menéndez, and Tom Musca

Tortilla Soup (Starz! Encore Productions, 2001) Directed by Maria Ripoll, written
by Hui-Ling Wang from a screenplay from Ang Lee
230

White Man’s Burden (1995) Directed and Written by Desmond Nakano

Zoot Suit (Universal Pictures, 1981) Directed and Written by Luis Valdez

Television Episodes

“This is Your Life” NBC TV Episode YLN 251 (June, 19, 1957).

Press Releases
Warner Brothers Press Release (March 20, 1979) “Mayor Tom Bradley to proclaim
‘Boulevard Nights’ an instrument of peace at gala preview event.” American Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS) Special Collections.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation argues that for some Chicano and Chicana artists and activists living and working in Los Angeles during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, what it meant to “be” Chicano or Chicana was increasingly mediated by a globalized and more inclusive conception of cultural identity that actively challenged and deliberately moved away from previous and oftentimes nationalistic models. As such, some examples of the cultural work produced by Chicanos and Chicanas, some of the Chicano discourse surrounding their cultural productions, and Chicano politics in general suggests that Chicano and Chicana artists and activists began to openly express a more inclusive and globally mediated concept of cultural identity. As in the past, Chicano cultural productions both responded to and were reflections of Chicano and Chicana perceptions of themselves at home while simultaneously finding solidarity and influence from populations abroad. This dissertation illustrate some novel approaches and examples Chicanos and Chicanas were invested in projecting a revamped globalized Chicanismo outside the context of the United States in an attempt to locate, reconcile, and assess what I see as instances of Chicano globalizations. I examine the production and dissemination of films such as Boulevard Nights (Warner Bros. 1979), Real Women Have Curves (HBO-Newmarket, 2002), the politics of the artist and activist collective “The Eastside Café,” and the music of underground Los Angeles rock bands such as Aztlán Underground, Rage Against the Machine, Quetzal, Slowrider, and the spoken word of Rocco from Mexico City’s Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio. I put these texts in conversation with the work of scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, the satiric work of the Theatre Troup Culture Clash, the prose of Rubén Martinez, and the visual art of fine artists such as Mario Ibarra Jr., and graffiti artists such as Nuke. This dissertation shows how Chicanos have been actively engaging and collaborating with other groups outside the US through the production and reception of popular culture. The circumstances surrounding these works also provides examples of what I find to be, to borrow from George Lipsitz, “Chicano Moments of Danger” that challenge both essentialized notions of Chicana and Chicano identity and state-centered narratives of identity formation.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rodríguez, Luís Carlos (author)

Core Title From Chicano therapy to globarriology: Chican@ popular culture and identity in late 20th and early 21st century Los Angeles

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 11/29/2012

Defense Date 08/29/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1979),2002),Boulevard nights (Warner Bros.,Chican@,Chicana,Chicano,Chicano identity,Chicano popular culture,film,gender,Globalization,Music,New Market,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular culture,Race,Real women have curves (HBO

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McKenna, Teresa (committee chair), Moore, Granville Alexander (committee member), Sanchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email lcr@usc.edu,luis.carlos.rodriguez.phd@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-122717

Unique identifier UC11292766

Identifier usctheses-c3-122717 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-RodrguezLu-1367.pdf

Dmrecord 122717

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Rodríguez, Luís Carlos

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA