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Machos y malinchistas: Chicano/Latino gang narratives, masculinity, & affect

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Machos y Malinchistas: Chicano/Latino Gang Narratives, Masculinity, &
Affect

by

José Alfredo Navarro

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
(ENGLISH)

December 2012

Copyright 2012 José Alfredo Navarro

ii
DEDICATION

To Jenell y Nayeli: Ustedes son mi vida entera!

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It should go without saying that any shortcomings, errors, and omissions related
to this project are solely mine. With that said, this project would not have been possible
without the unconditional and constant support of my faculty advisors, colleagues,
friends, and family. Specifically, I would like to extend a warm thank you to all my
committee members: John Carlos Rowe, David Lloyd, Jody Agius Vallejo, Teresa Mc
Kenna and David Román. John’s unflinching support of this project and its aims carried
me through my most difficult moments of writing, and shaped its direction; this project is
indebted to your work and advice. David Lloyd, your mentorship, feedback, and support
from the very first day I arrived on campus not only helped me finish this project but
made me a better thinker and scholar; you have been a key figure in my personal and
professional development. Jody’s disciplinary perspective and insightful comments on
my project lead to many necessary inclusions and exclusions. David R. and Teresa, thank
you for helping me shape the early versions of this project, and for helping me put the
many different Chicana/o and Latina/o texts I work with into conversations with one
another; David Román, I appreciate all that you have done for me; I never would have
come to USC had it not been for you. Teresa, thank you for your encouragement and for
reminding me to address questions of gender and sexuality in my work. In addition,
sincere thanks also go to Roberto Lint Sagarena who helped me draft an early version of
my prospectus. Muchísimas gracias!

iv
Many thanks to the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters,
Arts, and Sciences’ Department of English that continuously funded me throughout my
tenure as a doctoral student. More importantly, I thank the English department for a
fellowship that allowed me to research and draft significant portions of this project during
the 2011-2012 academic year.
In addition, I extend heartfelt gratitude to Laura E. Pérez, Marcial González, and
the late Alfred Arteaga who, at the University of California, Berkeley, offered me their
time, guidance, and mentorship—all of which were incredibly important to a young
Chicano who felt worlds away from his home in East L.A.—while I was an
undergraduate. Moreover, I offer sincerest thanks to William G. Tierney for the
opportunity to impact the lives of the many first-generation students of color through
teaching in and directing the USC SummerT.I.M.E. program. I am also indebted to Leigh
Gilmore who always offered great professional advice, support and encouragement. And,
a very special thanks goes to Domino Renee Pérez who offered great advice with respect
to this project—you definitely helped me to make this project much more manageable!
Many friends have also contributed to this work through their support of my
academic and personal lives. To my friends and colleagues at USC, who shared in the
struggles of graduate life, I offer many thanks: William “Memo” Arce, Michael Cucher,
Raeanna Gleason, Norma Bravo, James Penner, Ruth Blandon, Josie Sigler, Yetta
Howard, G. Conti, Alex Wescott, Alexis Lothian, Domino Torres, Jennifer Barager,
Margarita Smith, Mariko Dawson Zare, Mary Ann Davis, Jeff Solomon, Alex Young,
Michelle Har Kim, Nicky Sa-Eun Schildkraut, Tanya Heflin, Rory Lukins, Deb Al-
Najjar, Saba Razvi, Glenda Marisol Flores, Laurie Fisher, Victor Garcia, Emir Estrada,

v
Jack Blum, John Holland, James Brecher, Bill Feuer, Flora Ruiz, and Nellie Ayala-
Reyes. To my many other great friends, I also offer sincere thanks: Victor Vázquez,
Miguel Ornelas, Elizabeth Salanave Ornelas, Armando Vázquez, Leonardo Torres, David
Angel Martínez, Amalia Márquez, Richard & Jessica Corpus, Frank Guzman, Jose
“Jaco” Esquivel, and Jesus Carrera, Lorraine de la Torre, Valerie Arzate y a todas sus
familias.
Thanks especially to my familia. To my grandmother, Carmen, for loving me
unconditionally, always providing for me, and making miracles happen in everyday life;
to my mom, Dolores, for doing the best you could; to Maggie, Mando, Kristy, Krystal,
Angel, Israel, Timmy, Jerry, Isidro (Tank), Ricky, and to your respective families, I thank
you; to the Rodríguez, Muñoz, Serrato, Lucero, and Lopez clans, thank you. Special
thanks go to Ben, Sulema, Noah, and Susan Rodríguez—because we went through it all
together. And, to la familia Vázquez: Armando Sr., Eladia, Armando Jr., and Victor,
gracias por siempre recibirme como un hijo!
Last but definitely not least, my sincerest thanks go to my partner Jenell and my
wonderful daughter, Nayeli. Jenell, thank you for loving me, helping me work through
my ideas, and for reading the different drafts. My dissertation and my thinking have
certainly been impacted by your critical insights. You are the love of my life and I am a
better person today because of you. Nayeli, you have reminded me over and over again
throughout this last year to appreciate the simple things in life: to smell flowers everyday
on our walks, to look at trees and be in awe of their natural beauty, to smile and laugh
even at the most mundane things, and, most of all, to appreciate a good cuddle. I love you
both more than you could ever imagine!

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract vii

INTRODUCTION AMERICA WAS BORN IN THE STREETS 1

CHAPTER ONE CHICANO/LATINO ‘GANG NATIONS’: NATIONALISM, NON-
NATIONAL SUBJECTIVITY, & AUTOBIOGRAPHY 28

CHAPTER TWO CHICANO/LATINO GANGS & ‘CINEMATIC ART, IDEOLOGY, AND
FUNCTION’ 66

CHAPTER THREE SOUNDTRACKING LA VIDA LOCA: CHICANO/LATINO GANGS,
OLDIES MUSIC, AND AFFECTIVE POSSIBILITY 108

CONCLUSION AND THE ANSWER WAS REVOLT 142

BIBLIOGRPAHY 155

vii

ABSTRACT

Machos y Malinchistas interrogates how Chicano nationalist cultural productions,
after the Chicano movement (1960-2010), have posited a monolithic Chicano/Latino
identity primarily based on a racist, heteropatriarchal nation-state model for nationalism
that results in the formation of a “transcendental revolutionary Chicano [male] subject”
(Fregoso). Furthermore, although this project examines how these literary, cinematic, and
musical representations of Chicano/Latino men in late 20th century are strategically
deployed by the mainstream media and also by Chicanos/Latinos to simultaneously
reproduce and resist imperialist, racist, and heteropatriarchal logics of domination. It also
highlights the process through which dominant cultural ideologies force Chicanas/os and
Latinas/os to imagine themselves through the prism of a white racist, heteropatriarchal
nation-state—one that ultimately regulates Chicano/Latino identity and sexuality. Such
nationalist narratives, I argue, not only effect a symbolic erasure of Chicana and Latina
women—especially with regard to representations of these women in the novels and
films I analyze—but also fiercely regulate male Chicano/Latino sexuality. Therefore,
many of these literary and cultural representations of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os—
especially in gang narratives, and particularly with respect to representations of so-called
“figures of resistance” like El Pachuco and El Cholo—reveal the effects of Spanish and
U.S. colonial residues on the Chicano/Latino community while they underscore the
history of racism and sexism in the U.S.
In this respect, my preliminary conclusion is that the representations of
Chicano/Latino men and their masculinities/sexualities in literature, film and music in the
U.S. has largely been what I call a masking—or brown-facing—of the legacies of

viii
Spanish and U.S. imperialisms, heteropatriarchy, and racism in the country. Nevertheless,
I maintain that such performances still form particularly cogent responses to state
oppression and the underlying logics of domination. Furthermore, I argue that these
literary, cinematic, and musical products create opportunities to disrupt these imperial
logics. Finally, in my consideration of the ways that gender and sexuality mediate
Chicano nationalist discourses, especially as these discourses relate to Chicano/Latino
masculinity represented by Chicano/Latino gangs, I begin to rearticulate Chicano/a
Latino/a identity as a part of a larger anti-racist, egalitarian, and anti-imperialist political
identity that functions to “liberate [Chicano/a and other minority] constituencies from the
subordinating forces of the state” (Rodríguez 2009).
Consequently, Machos y Malinchistas utilizes the fields of American Studies,
Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies—specifically, Chicana/o Cultural Studies—, literary
criticism, and other subaltern historiographies as key frameworks for understanding
Chicana/o Latina/o nationalist cultural productions. My project draws upon recent
Chicana/o Latina/o scholarship like Richard T. Rodríguez’s Next of Kin: The Family in
Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) and Ellie Hernández’s Postnationalism in Chicana/o
Literature and Culture (2009) and puts key elements of these respective texts into
conversation with my analysis of Chicano/Latino nationalist texts—specifically, with
regard to the way Chicano/Latino gang figures have been utilized as a conduit of Chicano
nationalist resistance. More importantly, like Monica Brown’s Gang Nation: Delinquent
Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives (2002), my project levels a
critique of Chicano nationalism through the prisms of gender and sexuality in gang
narratives. However, unlike Brown’s critique, which relies heavily on notions of

ix
citizenship that support a nation-state framework for constructions of the Chicana/o
Latina/o identity, my critique offers a transnational and localized reimagining of the
Chicana/o Latina/o “nation” that facilitates a disruption of nationalist positions and
perspectives. My analysis, therefore, stages a transnational, stratified and feminist
critique of Chicano/Latino masculinity and sexuality that is mediated through Chicano
nationalism in these literary and cultural texts.
Chapter 1 of my project puts Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967) in
conversation with Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running (1993) in order to analyze the
ways in which Chicano/Latino cultural nationalism and masculinity continues to develop
and assert itself at the expense of women’s [especially Chicana/Latina women’s] bodies
though sexual violence. I argue specifically that in these texts, sexual violence functions
to make “conquerors” of subjugated men and to solidify homosocial relationships
between them based on a form of violence that is rooted in imperialist conquests rather
than nationalist projects. Nevertheless, I also argue that the representations in these texts
by Thomas and Rodríguez present, at the very least, multidimensional Chicano and
Latino figures—figures that attempt to deal with their own participation in and complicity
with these systems of oppression. For example, in the work of Thomas, this means
writing in the context of prison and, for Rodriguez, this is carried out through leveling
critiques of the school, prison and police systems. To that end, I suggest that these two
writers rely on the genre of autobiography to help articulate different, decolonial and
transnational subjectivities for themselves and for Chicanos/Latinos in general.
Chapter 2 examines cinematic representations of el cholo (i.e. the Chicano/Latino
gang member) as a cultural signifier in the films Boulevard Nights (1979), American Me

x
(1992), and La Mission (2009) because these films highlight the critical distinction that
needs to be made with respect to the performance of different types of masculinities and
Chicano/Latino nationalism, and how such performances relate to structures of
oppression like the prison system. I argue that while these representations reinforce
heteronormative and racist narratives related to Chicano/Latino gang members because
they posit Chicano masculinity as the violent antithesis of a “benign” hegemonic white
masculinity in order to maintain racist patriarchal structures of oppression, they also
allow for representations that undermine such structures. One of the key distinctions
among these films is film written, produced, or significantly controlled by
Chicanos/Latinos themselves insofar as such influence creates greater complexity in
representations of Chicano/Latino gang members, their masculinities/sexualities, and
nationalism.
Chapter 3 focuses on the connections between the musical collection of rhythm
and blues in Art Laboe’s “Oldies but Goodies” volumes and how this type of music
challenges static, stereotypical constructions of Chicanos and Latinos as nihilistic,
hypermasculine, and tragic figures of the community. Through an analysis of these
songs/lyrics and their deployment by Chicano/Latino gang members, I suggest a
contiguity between these figures and African American musical traditions that highlights
a radical potential to create a liberatory space akin to what Josh Kun calls an
“audiotopia.” The connection, I suggest, reveals the varied and multivalent personhood of
these Chicano/Latino men, and a complex articulation of their own masculinities through
the ways this music helps them express complex emotions. In addition, I argue that oldies
music also formulates a cultural and linguistic code that facilitates the transmission of

xi
these same complex emotions despite strictly regulated enactments of Chicano/Latino
masculinity in gangs, in the barrio, and in prisons in California.
Importantly, because my analyses focus on the discursive construction of a
transcendental [male] Chicano/Latino subjectivity, it reveals how machismo—a
racialized perfomance of hypermasculinity—is really a shadow of white supremacy and
heteropatriarchy. This argument expands on Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s (661, 1993) position
that “[c]ontrary to the historically variable and shifting range of Hegemonic
masculinities, the representation of the masculine identity of racially subordinated groups
stands out for its monologic and homogeneous economy, particularly in the case of
Latinos.” The preliminary findings in my research suggest that Chicano/Latino music,
particularly, “oldies” music, offer a literal and symbolic “soundtrack” to the
representations of Chicano/Latino men that undermine a monolithic representation of
these men.
Machos y Malinchistas, thus, contributes to a process of decolonization for
Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in re-examining the role of cultural nationalism in social and
political movements like the Chicano movement generally in relation to Chicana/o
Latina/o literature, film and music. In the end, I maintain that nationalism can be
strategically deployed and invoked to effect political change but it must be reconfigured
around different social relations that are inclusive, queerly imagined, and transcend the
limits of a singular nationalist identity that ultimately reinforces white supremacy.

1
INTRODUCTION

America was Born in the Streets

America was born in the streets.
-Advertisement for Gangs of New York (2002)

Gangs and gang culture have long been a problem in the United States but they
have equally been prominent figures in the American imaginary—especially with the
advent of film technologies in the early 20
th
century. Initially, for example, the original
Howard Hughes Scarface (1932) film was subtitled “The Shame of the Nation.” In 1983,
however, the Brian de Palma Scarface (1983) film drops the subtitle and, given the
cultural context of late capitalism, becomes an incredible success. Indeed, many people
also look fondly on the gangster figure of Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather (1972) perhaps because Don Corleone is characterized as the Italian patriarch
of a soon-to-be assimilated American family. Film critic Roger Ebert writes in his second
review of the film: “‘The Godfather'' is told entirely within a closed world. That's why we
sympathize with characters who are essentially evil” and, he adds, “Don Vito Corleone
(Marlon Brando) emerges as a sympathetic and even admirable character; during the
entire film, this lifelong professional criminal does nothing of which we can really
disapprove” (1997). Later, in his review of the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York
(2002), Ebert notes that the end result of this film is: “a considerable achievement, a
revisionist history linking the birth of American democracy and American crime.” He
also notes, “It is instructive to be reminded that modern America was forged not in quiet
rooms by great men in wigs, but in the streets, in the clash of immigrant groups, in a
bloody Darwinian
1
struggle” (2002). The list of such gang films and their glamorized,

2
nostalgic reviews can go on: The Godfather Part II (1974), Goodfellas (1990), Heat
(1995), etc. and, again, the reviews for such films repeatedly reveal Americans’
fascination with gangsters.
Nevertheless, not all gang films capture the American imagination with the same
“sympathy;” nor do many of the characters seem as “admirable” as Don Corleone. With
few exceptions, Chicano/Latino gang films have extended the long-held racialized
stereotypes of Mexicans portrayed in early Hollywood films albeit in an “updated,
modern” adaptation (Treviño) and most Chicano/Latino gang films do not earn praise for
a “revisionist history linking the birth of American democracy and American crime.” As
such, the difference between the characterizations of “near-White” Italian and Irish gang
narratives and Chicano/Latino gang narratives is the racial logic in the United States that
allows for sympathy and admiration of particular characters based on their proximity to
White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) identity. While the Irish and Italian immigrants
portrayed in the films above reflect the difficulties of incorporation into U.S. society
2
, in
the late twentieth century, such identities are largely claimed symbolically (Gans)
because of the dominant black-white racial politics in the U.S. Therefore, Chicano/Latino
gang narratives, by contrast, call up the specters of American imperialism
3
and the
“Latino Threat Narrative” (Chávez) that formed the West because such narratives
consciously and subconsciously situate Chicano/Latino gang members as modern
extensions of Mexican and Latin American figures of resistance.
Moreover, the underlying discomfort and disassociation with this new
embodiment of old racialized figures is not new within the framework of the logic of
American imperialism and settler colonialism. These logics and discourses of settler

3
colonialism and racism are merely transposed onto a “new American Congo” (Saldívar)
represented by urban ghettos in the United States where imperialist military forces have
been replaced by State forces like the paramilitary police and the prison system; and the
Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles become one of the first examples of such a shift in the 20
th

century. The Zoot Suit or Servicemen’s Riots in the 1940s was one of the first major
events in the 20
th
century in which mainstream media outlets demonized Mexican-
American and Latino youth in the Southwest in efforts to facilitate State violence. Many
Anglo-dominated media outlets reported that these pachuco youth were inherently violent
(Mazón) while African American newspapers characterized the problem as part of long-
standing racial discrimination against people of color in Los Angeles (Himes). In this
respect, not only were the pachucos of the 1940s among the first subjects of negative
media representation in a large metropolis, they also embodied an initial spirit of
resistance to State power. Thus, the early discourses of urban “gang nations” (Brown)
reproduced and responded to issues related to the control of resources (i.e. land/“gang
territory,”), people (“soldiers”/citizens/ gang members) and their identities and such
discourses arguably form part of the foundation of Chicano/Latino radicalism in the
1960s and 1970s, and while pachucos and Latino gang members are important symbolic
figures for the community, I will primarily focus on the discourses related to these figures
in this project. Therefore, the aim of this project is to understand and contextualize the
complex, literary and ideological discourses that develop from the experience of
Chicanos/Latinos in urban centers in the U.S. and from the efforts of Chicanos/Latinos to
tell their own stories about growing up in the barrio. The Zoot Suit riots and their
different portrayals in the news media already hint at the tensions in representations of

4
Chicano/Latino urban youth. As such, these discourses already involve a deconstruction
of particular mythologies related to Chicano/Latino gang members and their narratives.
What follows is a humble attempt to provide some insight into a related barrio thought,
cholo identity, its sexual politics, and its relationship to Chicano/Latino nationalism. Of
course, my analysis will also be situated within the politics of the context of mainstream,
late 20
th
century American representations of cholos that almost universally condemn
such barrio thought and identities.
My interest in this project stems from both a personal social location and a
political one but is rooted in very real experiences. I became interested in this project
because I was born and raised in the Ramona Gardens housing projects in East Los
Angeles, CA. Like many children in the projects, my grandmother raised me alone, and
we relied entirely on public assistance to survive. Needless to say, growing up in the
housing projects in the 1980s and 1990s was particularly difficult. Housing projects
throughout the city of Los Angeles seemed to be the centers of the often dangerous and
troubling intersection of drugs, gangs, and the newly militarized Los Angeles police. Of
course, the Ramona Gardens or “Big Hazard” housing projects were no exception.
Nonetheless, growing up in the projects meant that I was forced to become
intimately familiar with gangs, gang violence, and police responses that were often
equally violent and/or repressive. This magnified look at gang life in the projects also
allowed for a different, perhaps more empathetic, perspective on the phenomena that lead
to the formation of gangs, gang development, and gang identity. As such, I often found
myself rejecting and challenging many of the characterizations of Chicano/Latino gang
members in the news media and on television because most of these narratives relied on

5
overgeneralizations, stereotypes, and a racial politics of fear when they represented the
issue of Latino gangs in Los Angeles. At other times, these media narratives were
outright attempts to demonize these youth. Thus, the analogues between the role of the
mainstream representations of Chicano/Latino (gang) youth in the late 20
th
century and
representations of pachucos in the early 20
th
century suggest a political, social, aesthetic,
and ideological continuity that I hope to unravel in this project and through my analyses
of these Chicano/Latino gang narratives.
Chicano/Latino Culture & The Elements of Pachuquismo
That Pachucos, Cholos, and Vatos Locos formulate a cultural, symbolic, and
discursive resistance to dominant structures of power and that the semiotics of pachucos
and pachuquismo are transnational is a foregone conclusion. More importantly, that such
discourses challenge both the bigotry in the United States and the elitist tendencies of
intellectuals in México is evident in the history of the discourse on both Chicanismo and
pachuquismo. In 1961, Octavio Paz “confront[ed] his own image, seen against the
glittering backdrop of the United States,” and argued in Labryinth of Solitude (1961) that
the pachuco is an anti-nationalist figure. He writes that the Mexicans in Los Angeles
“have lived in the city for many years wearing the same clothes and speaking the same
language as the other inhabitants, and they feel ashamed of their origin;” yet, he adds,
“What distinguishes them… is their furtive, restless air: they act like persons who are
wearing disguises, who are afraid of a stranger’s look because it could strip them and
leave them start naked.” He notes, “[t]his spiritual condition or lack of a spirit has given
birth to a type known as the pachuco”
4
(13).

6
Later, Luis Leal, in his article, “Octavio Paz and the Chicano,” (1977) writes that
Paz reinterpreted the figure of the pachuco as the precursor to the Chicano and suggests
that this is one of the first connections drawn by an intellectual between these two
figures. Leal references José Armas’ interview with Paz where Armas asks: ‘Do you
agree that the pachuco is the precursor of the Chicano?’. Paz replies, ‘Yes, I believe, in a
certain way, the pachuco is the precursor of the Chicano” and adds, ‘When I examined
him…I found two things. In the first place, an attitude of desperation in the face of the
situation he confronted. And the answer was revolt” (Leal, 118). Leal also notes that Paz
said in the interview that the Chicano reorganized himself ‘not under aesthetic or suicidal
principles, but under political principles. Nevertheless, the origins of this revolt are not
to be found in the world of the pachuco” (Leal, 118). Leal writes that Paz very pointedly
notes that the pachuco was the emotional and psychological precursor to the Chicano
movement but not the intellectual precursor (118).
Arturo Madrid provides a different context for pachuquismo in his article “In
Search of the Authentic Pachuco” (1974). He argues: “Whether portrayed as
sadomasochist, victim, parasite, delinquent, or mythic avenger, the Pachuco escapes
emasculating classifications and survives as human being, enigmatic yet dynamic. Since
the conditions that gave rise to him have not disappeared, the Pachuco survives in time as
well.” He adds:
The baby chukes as Nesei’s pool parlor [in the poem El Louie] are living
testimony to the contemporary alienation of lower class Mexican youth in
America, for the Pachuco, with other names, with other styles, lives on not
only in the pages of our books but also in the pool halls of our barrios.

7
And although in the 1960s and into the 1970s Chicanos have fought
alienation with political awareness, the causes of estrangement of the mass
of Chicano youth from the American dream are too deep-rooted to be dealt
with in terms of the empty posturing of brown power or the middle-class
accommodations of ethnic politics” (Madrid, 37).
In “The Representation of Cultural Identity in ‘Zoot Suit,’” Rosa-Linda Fregoso argues,
“In poetry, mural paintings, and theater, Chicano movement cultural workers
systematically figured the pachuco (urban street youth) the pinto (ex-convict), and the
Aztec warrior as the new Chicano subjects of the counterdiscourse of Chicano liberation”
(Fregoso 662). Thus, the figure of el pachuco, whether historical or fictive, represents a
cultural, mythic, and very real response to structural inequalities in the United States with
regard to Chicanos and Latinos.
Chicana/o Latina/o Gang Culture, Identity, and Style as Sites of Ideological Struggle
Still, while these connections accurately point to the ways in which these figures
were part of the emergence of particular dominant figures of resistance like el bandido, el
revolucionario (Treviño) that were also central to early formations of a Chicano
nationalist identity insofar as they were at once outside the law and, resistant to the
dominant culture and the State. Yet, with few exceptions, these analyses of
Chicano/Latino nationalist identity largely gloss over the many ways these particular
figures reproduce logics of heteropatriarchal and white racist domination in the American
and Latino imaginary.
Chicano/Latino identity, then, needs to be contextualized in relationship to its
emergence and development in the United States, and in comparison with the

8
development of a seemingly monolithic “American” identity. American identity, insofar
as a stable American identity can be imagined, is inextricably linked to a continual
process of exceptionalism and differentiation. American culture, as an extension or
projection of this identity, is equally founded on this paradoxical process of
differentiation. Thus, notions about American identity and culture are necessarily a part
of what John Carlos Rowe calls a “mythical ‘American’ identity” (Rowe x-xi) that
becomes the foundation for a specific imagined citizen-subject and subjectivity in the
context of the nation-state. Nikhil Singh in “Rethinking Race and Nation,” adds, “In the
US context, the ideal national subject has actually been a highly specific person whose
universality has been fashioned from a succession of those who have designated his
antithesis, those irreducibly non-national subjects who appeared in the different guises of
slave, Indian, and, at times, immigrant” (9). Furthermore, Walter Mignolo argues that this
“presumptuous ‘model’ of ideal humanity on which… [the construction of the ideal
citizen-subject] was based was not established by God as natural order, but according to
the perception of Christian, White, and European males” (Mignolo 15). As a result, this
mythical American identity derives its meaning as a cultural/racial signifier from a
constellation of differences—i.e. in contradistinctions to the racialized other, the queer,
women, immigrants, etc.—and, the frequent contact with such Others only functions to
reify and reinforce the very mythology of such an American identity (Brady).
Unsettling Nationalist Identities
Most importantly, this mythic citizen-subject is also often imagined and invoked
as the interlocuter of literary cultural production in the United States. The omnipresence
of this interlocutor is best understood in the context of the way Mignolo describes the

9
role of religion in nation-state formations. Mignolo writes after the “secularization in the
eighteenth century and the emergence of the modern state, ‘nation’ replaced ‘religion’ to
bring about a new kind of imagined community. The concept of ‘culture’ was resignified
to express ‘national culture’ (language, literature, flag, history)” (Mignolo 16); and,
Rowe adds, “Among other cultural products of modern capitalism, literature has been
especially important in representing such powerful economic and political interests as the
‘nation,’ ‘people,’ ‘government,’ or ‘way of life.’” (xi). Literature, as Benedict Anderson
notes with respect to print capitalism, becomes one of the vehicles for the solidification
and transmission of “national” or nationalist culture. Literature also forms part of what
Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatus. He suggests, “the Ideological State
Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but the site of class struggle, and often of bitter
forms of class struggle” (Althusser 99). Henry Louis Gates, Jr. adds, “We must, I believe,
analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial difference
generate and structure literary texts by us and about us” (Gates 15). Thus, literary and
cultural production by and about Chicanas/os and Latinas/os become the sites of a
struggle for the articulation and realization of these same identities, and the sites for a
critical engagement with the reality of U.S. imperialism. The study of Chicana/o Latina/o
literary culture and its cultural products, as part of the greater development of American
literature, must therefore be understood in their historical context as influenced by the
philosophical, ideological, and imperialist development of the U.S. nation-state and the
ways the remnants of such development seeps into Chicano/a Latino/a cultural products.
As a result, nationalist Chicana/o and Latina/o discourses pose significant
challenges to the postcolonial liberatory project because of the totalizing framework of

10
the nation and because of the displacements that the Chicano/a and Latino/a communities
have experienced at the hands of the United States. Nonetheless, these discourses and
identities also straddle the lines between nations, communities, and between languages.
This “in-between-ness” has been best articulated as a mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa)
and as borderlands theory. Another component of such thinking and identity is the
emergence of transnational and postnational critiques of the dominance of the nation-
state.
Much of the Chicano/a scholarship over the last twenty to thirty years has been
committed to re-formulating and theorizing Chicano/a identity through postmodern,
postcolonial or decolonial, and postnational frameworks. Gloría Anzaldúa’s
Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and other Chicana/o scholarship begin specifically
developing a “third,” interstitial space for the construction of a Chicana/o identity.
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, in particular, is an indictment of hegemonic
repression on both sides of the U.S.-México border and begins with a literal and
metaphoric articulation of the border as a liminal space. As such, the border, for
Anzaldúa, becomes a symbolic place; it becomes a place that represents the Other—“the
squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-
breed [and], the half dead” (Anzaldúa 3). From this metaphoric/symbolic positioning of
the Border, Anzaldúa traces in Borderlands the (mythic) history of Chicanos in the
southwestern United States (specifically, on the Tejas-México border) and their migration
from the southwest into central México and back to the southwest (or Aztlán) again.
George J. Sánchez (1993) also argues that “Since Mexican migrants move between two
countries—one highly industrialized and the other severely impoverished—they have

11
been among the first to experience what some have called the ‘postmodern condition’”
(9).
In Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), José David
Saldívar argues: “U.S.-Mexico border writing is a continuous encounter between two or
more reference codes and tropes” (Saldívar, J. 1997 p.14), adding that: “The U.S.-Mexico
border changes pesos into dollars, humans into undocumented workers, cholos/as
(Chicano youth culture) into punks, people between cultures into people without culture”
(Saldívar, J. 1997 p.8). In other words, Saldívar (1997) argues that the relationship
between Chicanos/as and mainstream U.S. imperial culture effects a deterritorialization
and erasure or negation of cultura in the racial/national imaginary of the U.S. nation-
state. Rafael Perez-Torres in Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture
(2006), however, also argues that: “The uniquely hybrid nature of Chicano culture is
discussed as a correlative to the racial condition of mestizaje” that has been largely
unaddressed in U.S. racial discourse aside from the legal discourse outlawing
miscegenation (Perez-Torres, xi); and adds: “Mestizaje embodies the idea of multiple
subjectivities, opening up discussions of identity to greater complexity and nuance”
(Perez-Torres xiv). Mestizaje, as a result, offers the United States a glimpse at the future
of race relations and a methodology for dealing with racial mixture and complex cultural
constructions of identity. And, all of these authors attempt to articulate and theorize a
Chicano/a identity that is not constitutive of any nation-state but that is culturally,
ethnically and politically constructed (Arteaga).

12
Chicana & Latina Feminist Resistances
Furthermore, Chicana/Latina feminist scholars have also contributed significant
critiques of Chicano/Latino identity formation in the late twentieth century. In 1972,
Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez wrote: “Today we can say that the Chicana suffers from a
triple oppression. She is oppressed by the forces of racism, imperialism and sexism.”
Martinez, importantly added, “We [Chicana feminists] will not win our liberation
struggle unless the women move together with the men rather than against them” and
ends by noting that “the rape of our continent, our people, is historically linked”
(Martinez, 32-34). In “La Chicana,” (1972) Martinez effectively outlined the triple
oppression of Chicana women as a response to the development of a white, middle- and
upper class feminism and the gender-based oppression perpetuated by Chicano men. In
1976, Anna NietoGomez, in “Sexism in the Movimiento” extended Martinez’s assertion
that the oppression of Chicanas was historically linked with Chicano men. She writes:
“Sexism is part of the capitalist ideology which advocates male supremacist values….
The psychology of racism works in a similar manner. Racism is also a part of capitalist
ideology…. Both the Chicano and Chicana experience is affected by these two
ideologies. In fact, both the Chicano and Chicana experience racist-sexism”
(NietoGomez 98). Since then, Ellie Hernandez in Postnationalism in Chicana/o
Literature and Culture (2009) and many other Chicana/o and Latina/o scholars have
leveled significant critiques of Chicano cultural nationalism and its roots in a
heteronormative patriarchal nation-state model. Building on and extending
Chicana/Latina feminist critiques of Chicano/Latino cultural nationalism, my project
critically examines the discursive and visual representations of El Pachuco and the

13
Chicano/Latino gang member or the Cholo as a significant “figure of resistance” and
representation of Chicano/Latino masculinity because these figures are arguably integral
to any construction of Chicano/Latino masculinity and Chicano/Latino cultural
nationalism from the 1960s to the present.
As a result, within the broader framework of Chicana/o Latina/o literary and
cultural production, the many theorizations about land, territory, memory, culture, nation,
and the trauma that comes with such experiences have always provided ample subject
matter for the articulation and disarticulation of particular constructions of Chicano/a
Latino/a nationalist identities, and form an important site for its emergence and
contestation. In “A Dialectic of Difference: Towards a Theory of the Chicano Novel,”
Ramón Saldívar argues that the Chicano novel represents a poststructuralist response to
historical/material conditions of repression in the United States. Then, he (1979) adds
that the Chicano novel’s ideology of difference is a complex unity of its paradoxical
impulse toward revolutionary deconstruction and toward the production of meaning
(Saldívar 88). He concludes by suggesting that the Chicano novel allows us to “account
for the natures of its special interaction with both the Mexican and American social and
literary history” (1979, 89). Finally, R. Saldívar builds upon his formulation of a theory
of the Chicano novel based on a “dialectic of difference,” and expands its theoretical
reach by suggesting that the possibility of a Chicano ‘tradition’ promises that future texts
will be influenced by former texts. He adds that the Chicano novel and its function
“means that as an ideological apparatus the Chicano novel signifies the imaginary ways
in which historical men and women experience the real world” (1981, 36).

14
Saldívar, as a result, suggests three central tenets of Chicano cultural productions:
first, that Chicanos and Latinos engage in metacritical counterdiscourses by virtue of
their criticism and cultural productions; second, that such productions are
poststructuralist; and, finally, that the significant contribution of Chicano/Latino cultural
production is its social, political, and intellectual interactions with a realist/materialist
aesthetics in the United States. Therefore, Chicana/o Latina/o literary and cultural
production formulates a dialectical engagement with the historical conditions of
oppression in the United States and offers counter-nationalist and decolonial responses to
such conditions within the canon of Chicana/o Latina/o literature, film, and music.
Consequently, the initial premise of this project explores the relationships
between Chicano/Latino gang narratives, nationalism, masculinity, and U.S. imperialism,
and offers, much like Ramón Saldívar, that any exploration of Chicana/o Latino/a texts is
also an exploration of the ways the body of literary and cultural productions by and about
Latinas/os
5
engage with the different issues related to how these communities
“experience the real world” in the United States. This undertaking suggests that there is a
literary, political and ideological connectivity among these cultural products because of
the shared experience of U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism; and, that such a shared
experience is characterized, at the very least, by the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny,
and westward expansion in the 19
th
century, and the plethora of social, legal, and political
policies in the 20
th
century whose function was the management and containment of
people of color in the United States
6
.
In addition to these policies of colonial management and containment, the
framework of citizenship and “incorporation” and the attendant categories of “legal and

15
illegal” citizenship become the national framework for such containment and function as
a complement to regulative state and local policies like restrictive covenants
7
.
Furthermore, while many scholars have addressed these particular issues with citizenship
through the legal and juridical framework, for the purposes of this project, any
engagement with citizenship must be based on the abstract notion of citizenship as
“belonging” to cultural, social and political groups in general but whose salience is
necessary bound up with logics of coloniality and American imperialism
8
(i.e. as a
continuation of other imperialist policies of containment such as the Dawes Act). As
such, the formation of Chicana/o, Latina/o and other forms of subaltern identity in the
United States is informed by an engagement with these “real” histories of coloniality and
imperialism. Thus, the cultural products created by these particular subjects are also
inflected with these logics and shaped by these histories. In a recent collection of essays
edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez, they ask their contributors to
consider the “cultural aesthetics that reach back into precolonial México” and the “500-
year legacy of colonial and neocolonial subjugation and resistance in México and the
Americas, and the 150-year history of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)” against
the rise of “transnational and predatory capitalism” (Aldama/Quiñonez 2). In short,
Chicana/o identity, for example, is created, shaped, and informed by westward expansion,
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and many of the other social and economic policies
colonialists created to “manage” this population.
The Border as an Episteme
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian argues in The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader
(2006), “Historically the border as a knowledge formation figures prominently within a

16
critical vernacular pertaining to the cultures of imperialism, nationalism, and
neocolonialism as well as the polyvalent cultures of resistance and affirmation.” She
adds: “Not surprisingly in the literature of Chicana/o (cultural) studies, the border is often
intrusive or invasive; it designates a danger zone where state-sanctioned spaces of
illegitimacy, nationality, nationhood, and citizenship are enforced from a positionality of
conquest, domination, and privilege” (Chabram-Dernersesian 95-97). The Chicana/o and
Latina/o novel, in these contexts, can therefore be interpreted as part of a larger corpus or
body of work that can provide insight into a literary/historical trajectory of a community
of people in the United States. In this regard, the Chicana/o Latina/o novel becomes, in
terms of a larger literary tradition, a sort of “historical trace” that merits a reconstruction
or re-membering because of the fractures within and among a broader American literary
canon.
Such an articulation of the “border as a knowledge formation” is important not
only to constructions of Chicano/a literary and cultural identities but to the way, in this
particular case, Rodríguez’s Always Running thematizes his identity as formed from a
process of displacements and “border crossing[s].” Additionally, texts like Piri Thomas’
Down These Mean Streets articulate the subject position of Nuyoricans in urban centers
vis a vis the displacements of their community because of U.S. national and imperial
interests. Thus, if Chicana/o and Latina/o literature represents one particular fracture in
the foundation of the American literary canon, then, Chicano/Latino gang narratives
represents a deeper fault line.
As such, Machos y Malinchistas becomes part of the larger project about
Chicana/o identity and history. In his seminal study on the development of Chicano/a

17
identity in the first half of the twentieth century, George J. Sánchez outlines the
development of Chicano history and Chicano studies as a discipline. He writes that most
early Chicano scholars like Juan Gómez-Quiñonez engaged in a discourse about Chicano
identity and history that was based on a “bipolar opposition”—a model that did not allow
for a complex understanding of a multiplicity of identity constructions. Sánchez
importantly notes how Gómez-Quiñonez made a ‘call to debate on culture’ (7) that few
historians on Chicano writing and history took up. Sánchez argues: “Instead of exploring
and debating the issues he raised about the symbolic and transformative significance of
culture, Chicano historians focused their work on developing important alternative
theoretical approaches—such as internal colonialism, the process of barrioization, or the
dual labor market theory—to explain the constraints on assimilation” (7). Since then,
Sánchez argues, Chicano historians and writers have abandoned such rigid positions in
favor of theorizing through a multiplicity of identities and “contradictory positions.” He
adds: “‘Mexico, maybe even more so than other nations, was a national community that
had to be ‘imagined’ to exist, particularly given its racial and regional diversity” (9). As
such, México’s history, culture, and Aztlán itself became a “unified (w)hole
9
” or “unified
cultural concept” for Chicanos/as in the southwest of the United States—a unified
cultural concept that Chicanos long for and, arguably, mourn
10
. This unified concept of a
Chicano identity derived linearly from a “unified” Mexican/Azteca nation, in the height
of the Chicano movement, is subsequently posited as the basis for an emergent Chicano
nationalism.
In “Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical
Discourses” (2006), Rosa Linda Fregoso recognizes the need for a “strategic

18
essentialism” during the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s but qualifies it by
critiquing the reproduction of the processes or logics of subjugation on the part of
Chicano men. She writes: “Twenty years ago, the Chicano movement created a space
where an alternative cultural production and identity could flourish…. The Chicano
movement was recovering a past in order to undo fragmentation and alienation by
stressing our common culture and oneness. In this historical recuperation, what was
emphasized was similarity” (Fregoso, 2006). In other words, she suggests that the
Chicano movement ignored different subjectivities like queerness, gender, and sexuality
in order to combat the fragmentation and subjugation that was perpetuated based on race
and class alone. Then, she importantly adds: “The short-sightedness of the Chicano
studies intellectuals was that they assumed that the construction of their own self-
representations as subjects was equivalent to that of the totality of the Chicana/o
experience, and that this shared representation could always be generalized in the
interests of the entire group” (Fregoso 2006). In short, much of the early Chicano
scholarship and cultural production, especially with regard to representations of women
in the Chicano novel, is guilty of effecting an erasure that stems from positing a unified
cultural image/concept based on the nation-state model that results in the formation of a
“transcendental Chicano (male) subject”—and, central to this configuration of a
“transcendental Chicano (male) subjectivity” were the prominent “figures of resistance”
during the Chicano movement: El Revolucionario, El Bandido, El Pachuco y El Cholo
because all of these figures were at once outside the law and resistant to it.

19
The Urban Chicano/Latino [Gang] “Problem”
The urban setting becomes a dense microcosm for the racial and imperial politics
of the nation in the context of this form of colonial management because the large urban
centers like Los Angeles and New York are often the entry points and ends of colonial
expansion—they are the largest transnational entry points into and out of the U.S. George
J. Sánchez and Rosa Linda Fregoso argue that the “growth of the Chicano community in
Los Angeles [in the early part of the twentieth century] created a ‘problem’ for Anglo
American residents” (Sánchez 10) and that: “As part of official race-relations, Chicanos
and Chicanas become visible in public discourse as ‘social problems’” (Fregoso 659)
especially in the early 20
th
century. Moreover, Leo Chavez argues that Latinos’ “social
identity has been plagued by the mark of illegality, which in much of public discourse
means that they are criminals and thus illegitimate members of society undeserving of
social benefits, including citizenship” (3). Nonetheless, my argument focuses less on the
framework of citizenship, especially because the U.S. dominant structures operate on a
basis of exclusion of anyone who has been constituted as Other, and more on the
multivalent semiotics of gang membership in the Chicano/Latino community and then in
broader U.S. popular discourse.
Much has been written about Chicano/Latino gang membership in the 20
th

century. Sociologists, psychologists, and criminologists have all described the different
rationales for the development of gangs, gang membership, and their persistence in
American society. Malcolm Klein, for example, notes that the “common varieties of
street gang” are “essentially an American product” (3-4); James Diego Vigil points to
some of the “ecological” factors that led to the development of Chicano gangs in East

20
Los Angeles; and Martin Sanchez-Jankowski asserts that gangs developed as subaltern
responses to a white power structure in the United States.
Nonetheless, the disciplinary focus of this project is not necessarily to unravel the
sociological aspects of Chicano/Latino gang life but the social, cultural, political, and
symbolic aspects of such life particularly because such discourses are not, and should not
be, unidirectional. Among the many different constructions of Chicano/Latino identity,
the pachuco, the vato loco, and the cholo all stand out as figures that symbolize a
nationalist response to both the nationalist identities of their parents and the structures of
white supremacy and settler colonialism in the United States. According to Fregoso, Luis
Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1978) was the first fictional drama to “represent the ‘gang’ problem
from the historical perspective of Chicano subjects” (660). Zoot Suit (1978, 1993),
however, also falls in line with a series of texts about Chicano/Latino gang members
from El Pachuco to El Cholo including: Beatrice Griffith’s American Me (1948, 1973),
Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1993), Victor Hernandez Cruz’s Snaps (1969), Victor
Martinez’s A Parrot in the Oven (1998), Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poetry in Martín and
Meditations on the South Valley (1987), Miguel Duran’s Don’t Spit On My Corner
(1992), Mona Ruiz’s Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (1997), Ixta Maya Murray’s
Locas (1997), Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Ronald Ruiz’s Happy
Birthday, Jesús (1994) and, finally, Luis Rodríguez’s Always Running (1993).
Of course, such texts are contextualized in primarily urban centers like Los
Angeles and New York and respond to the postcolonial/postnational condition facilitated
by the construction of the border as “infinitely elastic” that serves as a “barrier and zone
of violence for the Mexican or Latino/a who is confronted by racialist and gendered

21
obstacles—material and discursive—anywhere s/he goes in the United States” (Aldama,
A. 15). Also, it is in this context of transnational and predatory capitalism that I, much
like Aldama and Quiñonez, consider late twentieth century and early twenty-first century
Chicano/a Latino/a literary productions that characterize the subcultural group that makes
up Chicano/Latino gangs and their narratives. As a result of such far-reaching elasticity
of the border region, Frederick Luis Aldama is able to argue in “Penalizing Chicano/a
Bodies in Edward J. Olmos’s American Me” that in the urban context, “Violence and
rapes invoke a larger history of colonization and conquest. He adds that the “rape of
Esperanza, [Santana’s mother in the movie], marks Santana a proverbial hijo de la
chingada” (Aldama, L. 80). Such implications importantly suggest a contiguity of
memory/history and a linearity or progression from early colonial encounters to a
relatively contemporary development of Chicano nationalism during the movement and
concomitantly with the development of Chicano/Latino gang members as figures of
resistance.
Machos y Malinchistas, therefore, will interrogate the ways the “macho” or
chauvinistic representations of Latino men might be considered part of the reproduction
of the conditions of the imperial/colonial contact of indigenous and conquering nations
and, by extension, responses to State discursive and material violence. I argue that
representations of men of color that deal with machismo, especially gang narratives and
figures of resistance like the pachuco and later the cholo, are reproductions of a “model
of manhood” introduced by conquest and the colonial situation. Such an argument
expands on Rosa Linda Fregoso’s (661, 1993) argument that even though masculinities
are in fact “variable and shifting” communities of color are rarely afforded such

22
multivalent ranges. This shows how in fact in the face of imperialist/nation-state
frameworks, Chicano/Latino men are limited with respect to the representations and
realizations of their own masculinities. Because of these internalized imperialist
formations of gender and race, it becomes significantly more difficult for communities of
color, in general, and Chicanos/Latinos specifically, to imagine differentiated gendered
identities—identities that challenge the imperialist monolithic representations of
Chicanos/Latinos. Nevertheless, such constructions, I argue, simultaneously resist and
accommodate dominant cultural ideologies, engender violence, and problematize
Chicano/a Latino/a sexuality because Chicanos/Latinos are forced to reproduce or
imagine themselves through the heteronormative, patriarchal “image” of a masculinist
nation-state. My aim is to interrogate heteropatriarchal formulations of Chicano/Latino
cultural nationalism that are centered on key figures of resistance like El Cholo and, in
the end, to re-imagine what this Chicano male subject has and has not been and what he
could be in a new transnational context. Also, through the analysis of literature, film and
music I attempt to highlight the radical potentialities, and even the liberatory futures, that
these cultural products can incite for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities.
Machos y Malinchistas utilizes an American Studies, Postcolonial, and Cultural
Studies—specifically, Chicano/a Cultural Studies—, Literary Criticism and other
Subaltern Historiographies as key frameworks for understanding Chicano/a nationalist
cultural production. Specifically, Machos y Malinchistas draws upon recent Chicano/a
Latino/a scholarship like Richard T. Rodríguez’s Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a
Cultural Politics (2009), Ben Olguin’s La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature, Culture,
and Politics (2010), Ellie Hernández’s Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and

23
Culture (2009) and, Sandra K. Soto’s Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery
of Desire (2010). I put key elements of these respective texts into conversation as well
that contributes to the field since there are few scholarly works, like Next of Kin, that
analyze gang members through a queer analytic. Namely, Rodríguez’s Next of Kin looks
at the ways in which la familia has been utilized as a concept to unify Chicanos, and as a
conduit of Chicano nationalism and, therefore, he utilizes a queer framework to challenge
the nuclear family as it has been an exclusionary construction to marginalize those who
do not conform to such notions of family. Olguin’s La Pinta contextualizes Chicanas/os
not only in a post-9/11 context that redefines criminality as related to discourses on
terrorism but also in the broader historical contexts of settler colonialism/imperialism.
Hernández’s Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture (2009) levels a
critique of Chicano nationalism through the prisms of gender and sexuality. In such a
critique, Hernández imagines a transnational disruption of the concept of the nation and,
thereby, facilitates transnational positions and perspectives.
Machos y Malinchistas also attempts to re-imagine central Chicano/a figures of
resistance like El Pachuco and El Cholo in the particular frameworks used by Rodríguez,
Olguín, Soto and Hernández—as an extension of la familia, in the context of the war on
drugs, the height of the crack cocaine epidemic and the militarization of the local police
department, and the ideological shifts with respect to criminality and terrorism after 9/11;
in addition, I consider the ways in which gender and sexuality mediate Chicano
nationalist discourses especially as these discourses relate to Chicano/Latino masculinity.
I, however, utilize the concept of la familia to understand how gangs often form around
this notion and create homosocial spaces, which potentially undermine the nuclear family

24
notion of la familia. Ultimately, my hope is not to argue for an abandonment of
Chicano/a identity formations to date but to rearticulate Chicano/a identit(ies) as a part of
a larger anti-racist, egalitarian, and anti-imperialist political identity that function to
“liberate [Chicano/a and other minority] constituencies from the subordinating forces of
the state” (Rodríguez, 7).
Chapter 1 of my project puts Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967) in
conversation with Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running (1993) in order to analyze the
ways in which Chicano/Latino cultural nationalism and masculinity continues to develop
and assert itself at the expense of women’s [especially Chicana/Latina women’s] bodies
though sexual violence. I argue specifically that in these texts, sexual violence functions
to make “conquerors” of subjugated men and to solidify homosocial relationships
between them based on a form of violence that is rooted in imperialist conquests rather
than nationalist projects. Nevertheless, I also argue that the representations in these texts
by Thomas and Rodríguez present, at the very least, multidimensional Chicano and
Latino figures—figures that attempt to deal with their own participation in and complicity
with these systems of oppression. For example, in the work of Thomas, this means
writing in the context of prison and, for Rodriguez, this is carried out through leveling
critiques of the school, prison and police systems. To that end, I suggest that these two
writers rely on the genre of autobiography to help articulate different, decolonial and
transnational subjectivities for themselves and for Chicanos/Latinos in general.
Chapter 2 examines cinematic representations of el cholo (i.e. the Chicano/Latino
gang member) as a cultural signifier in the films Boulevard Nights (1979), American Me
(1992), and La Mission (2009) because these films highlight the critical distinction that

25
needs to be made with respect to the performance of different types of masculinities and
Chicano/Latino nationalism, and how such performances relate to structures of
oppression like the prison system. I argue that while these representations reinforce
heteronormative and racist narratives related to Chicano/Latino gang members because
they posit Chicano masculinity as the violent antithesis of a “benign” hegemonic white
masculinity in order to maintain racist patriarchal structures of oppression, they also
allow for representations that undermine such structures. One of the key distinctions
among these films is film written, produced, or significantly controlled by
Chicanos/Latinos themselves insofar as such influence creates greater complexity in
representations of Chicano/Latino gang members, their masculinities/sexualities, and
nationalism.
Chapter 3 focuses on the connections between the musical collection of rhythm
and blues in Art Laboe’s “Oldies but Goodies” volumes and how this type of music
challenges static, stereotypical constructions of Chicanos and Latinos as nihilistic,
hypermasculine, and tragic figures of the community. Through an analysis of these
songs/lyrics and their deployment by Chicano/Latino gang members, I suggest a
contiguity between these figures and African American musical traditions that highlights
a radical potential to create a liberatory space akin to what Josh Kun calls an
“audiotopia.” The connection, I suggest, reveals the varied and multivalent personhood of
these Chicano/Latino men, and a complex articulation of their own masculinities through
the ways this music helps them express complex emotions. In addition, I argue that oldies
music also formulates a cultural and linguistic code that facilitates the transmission of

26
these same complex emotions despite strictly regulated enactments of Chicano/Latino
masculinity in gangs, in the barrio, and in prisons in California.
Importantly, because my analyses focus on the discursive construction of a
transcendental [male] Chicano/Latino subjectivity, it reveals how machismo—a
racialized perfomance of hypermasculinity—is really a shadow of white supremacy and
heteropatriarchy. This argument expands on Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s (661, 1993) position
that “[c]ontrary to the historically variable and shifting range of Hegemonic
masculinities, the representation of the masculine identity of racially subordinated groups
stands out for its monologic and homogeneous economy, particularly in the case of
Latinos.” The preliminary findings in my research suggest that Chicano/Latino music,
particularly, “oldies” music, offer a literal and symbolic “soundtrack” to the
representations of Chicano/Latino men that undermine a monolithic representation of
these men.
Machos y Malinchistas, thus, contributes to a process of decolonization for
Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in re-examining the role of cultural nationalism in social and
political movements like the Chicano movement generally in relation to Chicana/o
Latina/o literature, film and music. In the end, I maintain that nationalism can be
strategically deployed and invoked to effect political change but it must be reconfigured
around different social relations that are inclusive, queerly imagined, and transcend the
limits of a singular nationalist identity that ultimately reinforces white supremacy. My
hope is that my research, in the end, will lead to new ideas about Latino masculinity and
how young men of color need not think that aggression and criminal acts of violence are
somehow markers of their manhood and their sexuality; that is, I hope to begin a

27
discussion that disrupts narratives and attendant ideological perspectives that perpetuate
colonial and imperialist aims. I also hope that these Chican@s will develop a new
masculinity that is not rigidly defined by these colonial or State logics and discourses—
one that favors egalitarian, symbiotic representations and relationships that allow for
varied manifestations of femininity, masculinity and androgyny.

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CHAPTER ONE
Chicana/o Latina/o “Gang Nations”: Nationalism, Non-National Subjectivity, &
Autobiography

“O my body, make me always a man who questions!”
--Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

What to do with those whom society cannot accommodate? Criminalize them. Outlaw
their actions and creations. Declare them the enemy, then wage war. Emphasize their
differences—the shade of skin, the accent in the speech or manner of clothes. Like the
scapegoat of the Bible, place society’s ills on them, then ‘stone them’ in absolution. It’s
convenient. It’s logical. It doesn’t work
--Luis J. Rodríguez, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993).
Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967) emerged as a popular Latino text
during the Civil Rights movement in the United States and has remained in print ever
since. Down These Mean Streets (1967) is Piri’s poignant memoir about growing up in
Harlem’s El Barrio and feeling, living, and being forever the outcast as an Afro-Latino
man. As Thomas takes us along in his autobiography from the streets of Spanish Harlem
to his stint in the Merchant Marine and then, to prison, we can feel the pain, the poverty
and the pressure to be hombre (“be a man!”) in the context of the United States and its
white racist heteropatriarchal structure. The novel begins in Thomas’ adolescence as he
recounts his first experiences with his family, their negotiation of his darker skin (i.e.
their disavowal of their African heritage), and his interactions with mostly white Italians
in Harlem who read him as African American as opposed to Latino. Much of the
autobiography’s racial discourse, therefore, can be read as Thomas’ (and other Afro-
Latinos’) complex negotiation of identity in an American racial structure that is generally
constructed around a black-white dichotomy. And, such negotiations for Latinos are often
very personal—at one point in the novel, Thomas recounts confronting his “lighter
skinned” brother who identifies as white, and this confrontation leads to a physical fight

29
(143-145). Thus, Thomas also challenges the rest of his family and their identifications
with whiteness. These personal confrontations and negotiations are ultimately the
impetus for Thomas to “go down South” [the Southern United States] and attempt to
figure out where he and other Afro-Latinos fit in to this American racial hierarchy.
Nevertheless, Thomas also provides us with a significant discourse about his
process of becoming hombre or “becoming a man.” Early in his memoir, Thomas retells
the story of how his friends in the neighborhood would perform a particular type of
masculinity that seemed to be tied to the sexual conquest of young women. Thomas and
his friends called this game “copping drawers” and would often collectively re-
experience the sexual conquest of the young women in their neighborhood by their
retelling the stories of their sexual exploits. Furthermore, as other parts of Thomas’
discourse of masculinity and sexuality suggest, this process of becoming hombre is not
limited to sexual conquest. It also includes internalizing a hegemonic model of
masculinity
11
that dictates everything from one’s particular performance of masculinity to
the politics of penetration in homosexual relationships.
Down These Means Streets (1967), therefore, is a coming of age narrative
structured by autobiography as a genre. It signals not only the coming of age of a young
Afro-Latino in El Barrio but the coming of age of the United States with respect to its
infantile preoccupations with a simplistic racial binary, an unsustainable and deleterious
hegemonic model of masculinity, and a class system that is indefensible. Set primarily in
the 1940s and 1950s, Down These Means Streets (1967) provides a personal but also a
common context to the conditions in the United States that led to the Civil Rights

30
movement of the 1960s and 1970s; and, for Thomas, like many other men of color, this
story eventually takes him to prison and back.
In the present context, while one cannot deny the inroads made by the Civil
Rights movement in the United States, it would be irresponsible and intellectually
dishonest to suggest that we live in a postracial, egalitarian world. Certainly, the rigid
racial structure that existed when Thomas was writing has been significantly challenged
and reshaped but it has not been dismantled. For example, men of color continue to be
misrepresented in the media as hypermasculine and, even when they are included in
mainstream television shows, they become coopted as agents of repression in a
patriarchal order that still maintains white supremacy.
12
And, with regard to the prison
system, it is a fact that men of color are extremely over policed and over incarcerated
compared to whites. As a result, in the afterword to his thirtieth anniversary edition of
Down These Mean Streets (DTMS), Piri notes, “Racism is a most sad and terrible part of
America’s history. We know for a fact that since the Reconstruction days following the
Civil War, racists in white hoods or dressed otherwise have worked very hard to return
things to their version of the good ‘ol plantation days” as part of a reflection on the
continued publication of his text (335). Thus, while the publication of this text seems
bracketed between the Depression of the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement of the
1960s, with his latest reflection on his text, Thomas continues to assert the contexts of the
broader racist and imperialist histories of the U.S., beginning with conquest (through the
undercurrent of his relationship with his mother and her constant memories of Puerto
Rico) and extending through the contemporaneous moment.

31
Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1992),
while published in twenty-five years later, begins and is set in relatively the same time as
Down These Mean Streets (1967) was published. He begins by narrating the different
reasons his family migrated from México to Los Angeles; and, once in Los Angeles, he
narrates their migrations from Watts to Reseda to San Gabriel. He also writes about the
way in which such constant “migrations” led to general instability in his life and his
identity. Still, much of the book deals with two primary institutions—the educational
system and the police—and their reactions to young Chicano men in East Los Angeles
barrios. As a result of such a focus, much of his narrative levels a critique of State
power. Rodríguez importantly suggests how these negative interactions with the State are
the impetus for the way he and other young ethnic minorities identify as gang members—
that is, they form gangs partially as a response to State violence. Thus, if we understand
the educational system to be the system through which the State effects ideological
control and the police as the repressive apparatus of the State, then, Chicanos who
become gang members, criminals, etc., assume those “identities” in response to State
aggression/violence in his narrative. In this respect, Rodríguez’s work outlines radical
responses/identities to State violence and records this process as his own social and
political bildungsroman. His narrative, simply then, is about a Chicano gang member
coming into a political consciousness and taking action on behalf of the larger Chicano
community rather than the neighborhood gang. Nevertheless, for Rodríguez this process
involves an extension of the carnalismo that is central to gang membership rather than a
complete disavowal of gang identity in lieu of a Chicano political identity. This is no

32
where more evident than in the dedication of his book: Rodríguez tells us that his life is a
“poem” to the memory of his homeboys.
Thus, while these two authors seem to represent different experiences based on
their own identities and social locations (i.e. Rodríguez’s focus on his own experience as
a Chicano gang member in East Los Angeles and Thomas’ focus on his own experience
as a Afro-puertorriqueño in Spanish Harlem), their texts generally respond to the shared
experience of suffering white supremacy in the U.S. with respect to the context of their
social, economic, and political conditions. In fact, Rodríguez writes, in one of the critical
moments of his own emerging nationalist consciousness, about how he inherits a literary
and political lineage from books that he finds in the Piece College library where his
father worked as a janitor. He notes, “[The books] were primarily about the black
experience, works coming out of the flames which engulfed many American cities in the
1960s” and then he recounts how he comes across Piri Thomas’ Down These Means
Streets in the Pierce College library. According to Rodríguez, Thomas’ book became a
“living Bible” (Rodríguez 138) and arguably the model for Always Running.
In addition to the shared histories of colonialism and racism, Rodríguez makes the
connection between these two narratives more explicit in a poem titled “Mean Streets” in
his book The Concrete River (1991). He writes: “Your mean streets/ visited my mean
streets/ one hollow summer day/ in the 60s/ and together we played ball,/ cracking sounds
on the asphalt/ echoing from Los to Harlem” (111). In other words, Mexicanos/Chicanos
and Puerto Ricans in the United States and in Puerto Rico, as the two largest Latino
groups in the U.S., are often the primary targets of the racial discourse, racist policies,
and racist actions of the dominant power structure when it comes to dealing with “social

33
problems” but these texts suggest the type of literary, political, and theoretical
connectivity, even solidarity, that Ramón Saldívar has argued for among Chicano/a and
Latino/a texts in spite of such targeting.
This focus, nevertheless, on Chicanos/as—as Mexican-origin peoples—and
puertorriqueños as “problems” (even as part of the “gang problem”) in the United States
has a long history that is presented as a question of national belonging (i.e. citizenship)
but it is a focus that is necessarily also related to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism.
What ties most Latinos in the United States together is this shared history of Spanish,
French, and U.S. imperialisms and their attendant racial structures carried out through
colonialist logics—even, and most especially—in contemporary urban contexts. In the
afterword to the Thirtieth Anniversary edition of Down These Mean Streets (1976), Piri
Thomas says, “I wrote about the conditions of life in the barrio back then, but in spite of
books like Down These Mean Streets, Manchild in the Promised Land, and The Wretched
of the Earth, alas, the same conditions still exist for the poor today” (334). His reflection
reveals, at the very least, two truths for Thomas: first, that these texts are interrelated
because of the historical and material conditions of colonialism and imperialism vis-a-vis
relationships between the interests of Fanon, Brown, and Thomas; and, second, that these
texts can impact the conditions of the barrio in the U.S. as counter narratives to the
discourses of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Similarly, Rodríguez writes in the
beginning of his autobiography, “We never stopped crossing borders. The Río Grande (or
Río Bravo, which is what the Mexicans call it, giving the name a power ”Río Grande”
just doesn’t have) was only the first of countless barriers set in our path” (19) and thus
transforms the border between México and the United States into a metaphoric, social,

34
and political reality that extends all the way up to urban Los Angeles. Rodríguez, like Piri
Thomas and Angie Chambram-Dernersesian, positions his experience in urban L.A. as
part of the broader historically imperialist relationships between the U.S. and Mexico
13
.
Thus, the context of post/colonialism, U.S. imperialism, white supremacy, and the
premise that these texts are narratives of resistance formulate the basis of my analytical
approach to these texts. Nonetheless, because of the ideological functions of colonialism,
these texts, as I have suggested before, also reproduce the logics of imperialism and white
supremacy. Still, Thomas and Rodríguez attempt to resolve such ambivalence by actively
critiquing and challenging the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser) in place as these
apparatuses function to negate their individual subjectivity and reduce them to the sum of
the parts of a constructed and contested racial self. Additionally, they begin to unmask
the racialization of their own masculinities as they relate to and perpetuate a white, racist
heteropatriarchy vis-a-vis their subscription to Chicano/Latino nationalist identities.
Resistant Figures/Resistant Texts: Education, Race, and Non-National Subjects

“The Problem of the Twentieth Century…”
Both Piri Thomas and Luis Rodríguez offer significant critiques of the
educational systems in their texts, and in scenes reminiscent of W.E.B. Dubois’ famous
schoolhouse rejection scene, offer a narrative allusion that suggests a shared racializing
experience in the United States. Rodríguez writes, “The first day of school said a lot
about my scholastic life to come. I was taken to a teacher who didn’t know what to do
with me. She complained about not having any room, about kids who didn’t even speak
the language. And how was she supposed to teach anything under these conditions!”
Later he adds, “It got so bad, I didn’t even tell anybody when I had to go to the bathroom.
I did it in my pants” (26). By contrast, Piri writes, “One day I raised my hand to go to the

35
toilet, but [Miss Shepard] paid me no mind. After a while, the pain was getting so bad, so
I called out, ‘Miss Shepard, may I leave the room?’ She looked up and just shook her
head, no.” After asking politely to go to the bathroom, Piri tries to leave the classroom
without permission but Miss Shepard grabs him by the shirt. In that moment, Piri begins
to urinate on himself. He writes, “All I could see was her being the cause of the dampness
in my pants and hot pee running down my leg. All I could hear was the kids making
laughing sounds and the anger of my being ashamed” (65-66).
These schoolhouse scenes suggest that racism is structured by ideological state
apparatuses like the educational system, and that such structures elide gender differences
and gender roles in the service of white supremacy. The allusion above is, as I mentioned,
to the experience that W.E.B. Dubois has in his classroom during an exchange of
Valentine’s Day cards in which he is rebuffed for daring to offer a young white classmate
a card. This experience becomes the formative experience and foundation for Dubois’
articulation of framework of double consciousness. The transposition of such a narrative
of double consciousness in these particular scenes for Thomas and Rodríguez should also
be clear. However, these traumatic educational scenes also reflect an implicit indictment
of not only racial attitudes but also gender-based expectations in an educational setting.
In other words, the two women teachers in these scenes are expected to transcend racist
outlooks with regard to their students, assume a nurturing and “motherly” role, and help
Thomas and Rodríguez. Instead, these women defer to a masculine controlled State
apparatus that perpetuates racism and fails or pushes out young men of color. In short,
these two scenes are particularly salient because it is the function of the educational
system and of its teachers to properly educate and socialize all students; in these cases,

36
Thomas and Rodríguez are suggesting that this—the educational setting—is where the
process of marginalization, criminalization, and creating non-national subjects begin for
Latinos and other people of color.
Chicano/Latino Nationalism, Masculinity & Sexual Violence

“It was all part of becoming hombre…” –Piri Thomas.

Throughout his narrative, Piri Thomas offers ample discussions about the effects
of racism and class difference with respect to Latinos, Afro-Latinos, and African
Americans in the United States. In chapter three of Down These Mean Streets, for
example, Piri recounts the story of the death of a kid called “Dopey,” and begins a section
of the novel that is concerned not only with race and class but also with “becoming
hombre.” Thomas seems very concerned with this process and the representations of the
Latino man—el hombre—in this chapter because for Piri and many other men of color,
the entrance into manhood comes not only with confronting their own mortality, it comes
with confronting death itself. As a result, it is early in the novel that Piri narrates the
death of Dopey, “a lopsided –looking kid who was always drooling at the mouth” (14).
But Piri prefaces Dopey’s death and his own masculine confrontation with death with
what seems like a qualifier rooted in class politics. He writes: “We rolled marbles along
the gutter edge…. We stretched to the limit skinny fingers with dirty gutter water caked
between them, completely oblivious to the islands of dog filth, people filth, and street
filth that lined the gutter. The gutter was more dangerous than we knew” (Thomas 14).
In his qualification about male bravado and the performance of his own masculinity
through confronting the death of his friend, the gutter is quite clearly a literal and
symbolic representation of class and the stage for this performance of masculinity

37
because, for Piri and most men of color, facing death was an every day part of their lives
in the U.S. Piri’s performance of Latino masculinity, as such, suggests that the conditions
of the working class—i.e. braving poverty, racism, and the violence implicit in living in
communities like El Barrio—are integral to its staging.
After setting the stage for Dopey’s death, Piri continues: “The next time we saw
Dopey, he was in a coffin box in his house. He didn’t look dopey at all; he looked like
any of us, except he was stone dead. All of us went to Dopey’s funeral” (Thomas 15).
Piri’s assertion that Dopey “looked like any of us” reveals the synecdochic logic of race
and racism in the United States, and the personal relationship between Piri and his
friends. Edelman writes, “Synecdoche…can be read as the master trope of racism that
gets deployed in a variety of different ways to reinforce the totalizing logic of identity”
(44). In this way, the narrative staging of the conditions that led to Dopey’s death and the
performance of a particular subaltern Latino masculinity forces Thomas to perform his
own death in light of seeing Dopey dead in the coffin. Thomas writes:
For a few days after Dopey’s funeral we talked about how Dopey now was
in a big hole in the ground till his bones grew rotten and how none of us
was afraid of death or dying. I even described how I’d die and breathe my
last breath. I did the whole bit, acting out every detail…I spoke about
leaving for the last roundup in the ranch up yonder, an idea I got from a
Johnny Mack Brown cowboy flicker. It was swell acting (15).
In this performance, Piri positions this scene as a part of the discourse on race that is
governed by what Lee Edelman calls the synecdochic logic of race (above); nonetheless,
this staging also suggests that the discourse on race and class is central to the narrative

38
structure of Down These Mean Streets (1967) and to the performance of Latino
hypermasculinity/machismo. More importantly, given the constructedness (both in the
Foucauldian sense and in a historical/material sense) of race and class, and the
performance of Latino masculinity, Piri’s narrative ordering of all three markers of
identity suggest an inability to uncouple them from any articulation of Latino male
identity.
Thus, Piri reproduces the synecdochic logic of race and racism in his performance
precisely because he understands how he and Dopey share in the landscape of poverty,
oppression, and violence on the streets of Harlem’s El Barrio. Piri understands his social
location as a material reality. This process of substitution is also, at the very least, a result
of a capitalist ideology where people are reified and, as such, expendable or replaceable
parts in a machine or, in Dopey’s case, a “box” and is reflective of experiencing the
concrete material conditions of poverty in the U.S.
Additionally, Piri’s performance of this type of masculinity is, because of the
scopic and synecdochic logic of race, for himself as much as for the other. It is the
reason why, in his attempt to explore his own subjectivity and masculinity, he frames his
performance of masculinity in terms of a “Johnny Mack Brown cowboy flicker”—a
Western movie. This framework is also revealing because Westerns often explore the
racial tensions between Mexicans—who, in Hollywood, often stand in for all Latinos—
and Anglos in the Southwest as a result of U.S. imperial expansion vis-a-vis Manifest
Destiny. It also reveals the way Piri may subconsciously be internalizing and
representing Western thought and dominant models of masculinity. By analogy, Lee

39
Edelman, when talking about the Dubois’ rendering of a “self-conscious manhood,” the
double conscious and the scopic logic of race, argues:
Such a translation of conflict into harmony, of self-division into ‘truer’
selfhood, in the hope of escaping the duplicity, the double positioning
imposed by the necessity of ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes
of others,’ replicates the governing logic that shapes the patriarchal subject
and thus properly describes the cultural ambition ‘to attain self-conscious
manhood.’ It recapitulates, that is, the structuring belief in the coherence
of identity, the unity of drives, that informs the fiction of ‘manhood’ and
allows it to serve, within a patriarchal dispensation, as the referent of
subjectivity and selfhood (Edelman 50).
As such, while Piri may be enacting and reproducing the “duplicity” of fulfilling the
necessity of ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,’ Edelman’s critique
of this duplicity is limited here because it assumes the ideological framework of the
structures of racism and patriarchy are never challenged or disrupted. Edelman makes the
assumption that the ‘truer’ self or the ‘self-conscious’ man must be a reversal of the
control of the gaze—of the “power to look upon others.” This may not necessarily be the
case. What Dubois may be suggesting is that the ‘truer’ self is in fact revealed by the
process of seeing oneself for the very first time—without a racialized lens.
Edelman’s problem, then, is that he imagines, in the “fantasy of masculinity,” not
solely a “non-self-conscious selfhood”, but a selfhood “endowed with absolute control of
a gaze whose directionality is irreversible” (Edelman 50-51). The resolution of such a
division of self does not necessarily have to be reactionary or a reversal of the conditions

40
of the gaze; nor does it presuppose a unified self according to the Western patriarchal
model. In fact, as bell hooks has argued in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992)
“the gaze has always been political” since it is a great mechanism of control and that
there is deep “power in looking” (115). What hooks also contends that may in fact work
best to counter Edelman’s position that this mechanism of control is “irreversible” is her
articulation of an oppositional gaze (116). She suggests that even in all the attempts of a
white supremacist state to repress people of color’s gaze the possibility to look back has
always been there, establishing some sense of self. hooks understands the historical
trajectory of the self for people of color as well by suggesting her own agency in looking
back has been somewhat constituted by knowing slaves, too, had reversed the gaze for
selfhood (116). Thus, the resolution of the division of self, as described by Dubois and
represented by Thomas, is only imaginary—but the imagination is powerful and is
nonetheless where this resolution must take place first. This is Paulo Freire’s suggestion:
The resolution of the double consciousness must begin with a concentiçao as Freire
would say—the consciousness of oneself, not one self.
Moreover, the question of Chicano/Latino masculinity is one that has been
seriously considered since at least the onset of the Chicano Movement. Maxine Baca
Zinn writes that historically the Social Science image of the Chicano male is rooted in
three interrelated propositions: 1) that a distinctive cultural heritage has created a rigid
cult of masculinity; 2) that the masculinity cult generates distinctive familial and
socialization patterns; and, 3) that these distinctive patterns ill-equip Chicanos (both
males and females) to adapt successfully to the demands of modern society (Baca Zinn,
221). Baca Zinn’s synopsis of the Social Science’s characterization of the Chicano is

41
telling. It outlines the way the Social Sciences have been complicit in perpetuating a
hypermasculine image of the Chicano/Latino and, by extension, machismo (as a
racialized performance of hypermasculinity) as a legitimizing framework for
understanding this particularly racialized form of masculinity as stemming from a
“distinctive cultural heritage” that creates a “rigid cult of masculinity.” However, this
supposed “rigid cult” of Chicano/Latino masculinity is problematic because of a series of
literal, epistemic, and discursive colonizing practices, events, definitions, and dominant
negative representations of Chicano/Latino machismo or hypermasculinity in the United
States—especially in genres like Westerns— as they function intentionally to obscure
healthier models of masculinity for men of color. In the case of Piri’s performance, he
has internalized a racist vision of himself as a “Johnny Mack” character.
In this context where men of color reproduce such logics of domination, Paulo
Freire writes that the man of color can be classified as a ‘sub-oppressor’ because he
internalizes and deploys racist/imperialist logics of oppression against himself and his
community. Freire goes on specifically to say that for colonized men, “[t]heir ideal is to
be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors” (27). Nonetheless, again, Maxine
Baca Zinn argues for a magnified, global examination of patriarchy and masculinity that
calls for a historically and culturally specific recontextualization of both. What Baca
Zinn suggests is that male chauvinism/dominance is not something that is inherently
Chicano or Latino. She claims it is not “rooted” in Chicano history and goes on to argue
for a “universal” characterization of most societies as “male dominant” or
hypermasculine, saying that most societies, with few exceptions, apparently privilege
men’s work over women’s work. She also continually underscores the importance of

42
structural rather than cultural determinants of male behavior and male identity formation.
She notes, finally, that social stratification and systematic exclusion from certain “social
categories” leads to the contrasting behavior in men from different social classes and I
feel these notations deserve to be quoted at length. She writes:
[M]en in certain social categories have had more roles and sources of
identity open to them. However, this has not been the case for Chicanos
or other men of color. Perhaps manhood takes on greater importance for
those who do not have access to socially valued roles. Being male is one
sure way to acquire status when other roles are systematically denied by
the workings of society. This suggests that an emphasis on masculinity is
not due to a collective internalized inferiority, rooted in a subcultural
orientation. To be ‘hombre’ may be a reflection of both ethnic and gender
components and may take on greater significance when other roles and
sources of masculine identity are structurally blocked…. To view
Chicano male behavior in this light is …to recast masculinity in terms of
responses to structural conditions (Baca Zinn, 229).
Thus, with respect to these texts by Piri Thomas and Luis Rodríguez, it is precisely their
narrative engagements with these structural conditions that require analysis that do not
simply suggest that they reproduce logics of oppression but such analyses should also
suggest that they challenge these logics. This is part of the tension and uncomfortability
inherent in 1960s/post-1960s texts written by Chicano/Latino men. Their engagements
with these colonial logics and discourses cannot and should not be simply subsumed to
particular political aims. Note that while Baca Zinn wonderfully illuminates the internal

43
U.S. socioeconomic structural influences on Chicano male behavior, she does not
elaborate on the broader historical colonial and imperial influences on such behavior.
Contextualizing these narratives in the ‘concrete’ historical condition of colonization sets
the parameters of masculinity for these men of color and allows for more generous
readings of their performances of masculinity.
Dopey’s death in Piri’s narrative, therefore, becomes a multivalent symbolic
event. It signals an awareness of the material conditions (i.e. the poverty, racism, and
imperialism he suffers) that create the stage on which masculinity is performed by
Latinos/Chicanos; and, it signals a willingness to confront the implicit dangers of such
settings. More importantly, Dopey’s death offers the opportunity for Piri to perform his
own death through the framework of an American Western (i.e. through the character of
Johnny Mack Brown) and, therefore, because his death is only a performance, leaves
room for a re-birth. Of course, such a reading cannot ignore the problematic relationships
and racist ideologies that Westerns (as films) have deployed to maintain white racist
heterpatriarchal structures. However, because these allusions in the narrative come at the
moment of death they lend to a morbid hope for Piri and other men of color.
“The refrain ‘this is not your country’ echoed for a lifetime” –Luis J. Rodríguez.
In one of the foundational moments of his text, Luis Rodríguez recounts his first
memory encountering racism in the United States. He writes: “Our first exposure in
America stays with me like a foul odor. It seemed a strange world, most of it spiteful to
us, spitting and stepping on us, coughing us up, us immigrants, as if we were phlegm
stuck in the collective throat of this country” (Rodriguez 19). Then, he recounts the story

44
of how, one day, on a visit to Will Rogers State Park, a white woman throws them out
and suggests that his family does not belong in the U.S. He writes:
Once my mother gathered up the children and we walked to Will Rogers
Park. There were people everywhere. Mama looked around for a place we
could rest. She spotted an empty spot on a park bench. But as soon as she
sat down an American woman, with three kids of her own, came by.
‘Hey, get out of there—that’s our seat.’
My mother understood but didn’t know how to answer back in English. So
she tried in Spanish.
‘Look spic, you can’t sit there!’ the American woman yelled. ‘You don’t
belong here! Understand? This is not your country!’
Mama quietly got our things and walked away, but I knew frustration and
anger bristled within her because she was unable to talk, and when she
did, no one would listen” (Rodriguez 19).
This first chapter, as a result, offers insight into the foundation for Rodríguez’s discussion
of the “body” politics of racism in the United States. In other words, the discourse of race
and racism, for Rodríguez, necessarily involves a discourse rooted in a physical and
symbolic national corporeality. Because of this, for Rodríguez, issues of citizenship,
belonging, and community are literally written on the body and the stark racial
formations of the U.S. do not allow much room to disavow such.
In her article “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting
Trauma, Re-Establishing the Self,” Roberta Culbertson makes some critical distinctions
between notions of memory, “proto-memory,” and the ways in which we remember

45
trauma through and on the body much like in Rodríguez’s narrative. Culbertson seems to
be suggesting that there is something inarticulable about experiencing trauma—some
thing that remains forever tied to the body. She writes, “Survivor writings make it clear
that to be a survivor of one’s violation is precisely this: to live with the paradox of silence
and the present but unreachable force of memory, and a concomitant need to tell what
seems untellable” (Culbertson 170). Then, she adds, “It is the paradox of a known and a
felt truth that unfortunately obeys the logic of dreams rather than of speech” (Culbertson
170). Culbertson also importantly points to the “ordered” nature of the way we
remember and narrate in contrast to the ways we “dream”; she suggests that the narrative
form and ordering process seems to present particular challenges to articulating trauma.
Nevertheless, Culbertson ends by reiterating that despite the fact that narratives present
particular structural and cultural problems to communicating violence and violation, the
survivor feels a “compulsion to tell” precisely because telling becomes a symbolic
mechanism for re-birth. Or, at the very least, the re-telling becomes a place where the
survivor can be re-born fictively because the narrative recasts the survivor as subject and
object of the story.
Rodriguez’s text, therefore, can be read as a “survivor” narrative, and the focus on
a corporeality in traumatic scenes in his text signal the ways in which Culbertson’s “felt
truth” comes through his “ordered” narrative. Again, one of the earliest scenes of racial
trauma in Rodríguez’s text comes at the moment his mother is confronted in Will Rogers
State Park and he characterizes this encounter by saying that it seemed as if his family
was “phlegm stuck in the collective throat of [the United States]”. He adds that he felt as
if the country was “coughing us up” (19). More importantly, in retelling these incidents

46
of racist violence, vomit and spit up become the governing metaphor for traumas that
stem from racism and sexual violence for Rodríguez; and, this visceral response is the
literal representation of a symbolic “felt truth” related to broader state violence and the
logics/practices of coloniality.
For example, Rodríguez, recounts his mother’s revulsion at him when she learns
that he became a gang member. He says, “Mama hated the cholos. They reminded her of
the rowdies on the border who fought all the time, talked that caló slang, drank mescal,
smoked marijuana and left scores of women with babies bursting out of their bodies. To
see me become like them made her sick, made her cringe and cry and curse” (48). The
juxtaposition of the narrative of exclusion at the onset of his narrative, the various rapes
he recounts later, and his love affair with a prostitute all seem to connect racial and
sexual trauma with a literal and symbolic trope of sickness and vomit. It also
metaphorically symbolizes Culbertson’s argument about trauma and a “compulsion to
tell.” In addition, these reactions by Rodríguez’s mother and Rodríguez himself to trauma
suggest a chiasmatic internalization and reproduction of the very logics of coloniality,
racism, and nationalism that they suffer as subaltern subjects but also reproduce. In other
words, Rodríguez’s mother is made “sick” by his gang membership while Rodríguez is
made sick by witnessing the rape of young women of color; and both are made sick by
their early experiences with racism in the U.S.
All of these characterizations point to significant and complex social and political
contexts, and histories of U.S. imperialism related to Mexico and, by extension, Latin
America in general. The image of the cowboy in the “copping drawers” scene is, as I said
before, evocative of “manifest destiny” and westward U.S. expansion
14
while the image

47
of Scarface (Hawks, 1932) alludes to the way Italian immigrants assimilate into the
United States through proximity to “whiteness” (See Herbert Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity).
More importantly, note that the story of Scarface, like Piri Thomas and Luis Rodriguez’s
narratives, is one that seems to challenge or resist the structural blockages that
immigrants face upon entering the United States. In Scarface Antonio “Tony” Comonte
is determined to become upwardly mobile by bootlegging and gang membership in spite
of the traditional immigrant narratives of upward mobility. Both characterizations very
poignantly respond to structural blockages for the immigrant and racialized Other but
ultimately reproduce the logics of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and settler
colonialism through a capitalist/materialist value system and through the subjugation of
women in these texts (i.e. the transformation of women into objects of male desire).
While these texts reproduce and are unconsciously complicit with propagating
this U.S. national narrative of development, they remain sites of discourses that engage in
a processual decolonizing, and postnational approach to understanding social relations.
Donald Pease argues, “National narratives derived both their coherence and their claim to
‘universal’ value from their opposition to the ‘other’ national narratives.” He adds, “But
the contradictory relation between difference and sameness out of which national
narratives and national identities were fashioned could only be resolved into a unity
through the state’s intervention” (4). Thomas and Rodríguez understand these
relationships very clearly. For example, when Piri Thomas does not participate in the
“copping girls’ drawers” game, he understands the risks involved—expulsion from the
“crew” and, therefore, becoming a non-national citizen/subject in the gang nation.
Consequently, while he does not participate in the sexually charged game that functions

48
to solidify homosocial and, perhaps, homosexual relationships between the boys who tell
these stories, he also does not oppose them. The same is true for Rodriguez—except that
when he does speak out against violence, one of his homeboys actually tries to hurt him
and effectively expels him from the “gang nation.”
The most prominent critiques of Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets and Luis
Rodríguez’s Always Running (1992) centers, as I have suggested above, on the ways
these two texts represent women, sexuality, and sexual violence. Monica Brown argues
that “[rape] culture is evident throughout Rodriguez’s narrative, though acts of rape
expands even further, becoming a tactic of war, a way of ‘violating’ enemy territory, by
violating the body of ‘their’ women, to which they have exclusive property rights” (70)
and points to this “culture” as a part of the multifaceted way “[t]hese ‘counter-nations’
[Latino gangs] simultaneously mirror and expose some of the most oppressive facets of
the dominant culture’s construction of nation and an American ‘national symbolic’”
(xvii). For example, Rodríguez recounts a very graphic rape scene while out with his
homeboys one night. He writes:
We jumped into Ernie’s lowrider van. Paco and two girls were
inside the van. Ernie put on some music which rattled the brain cells
through speakers in the front and back of the van. Fuzzy and Yuk Yuk
talked with the girls as I took swigs of Silver Satin wine and snorts of
heroin. Mellowed and mumbling, we drove through the wet side streets
toward the Hills.
The girls were loaded; incoherent and sleepy. Makeup smeared
their faces. Paco groped through the blouse of one of the girls, who faintly

49
tried to pull him off. Fuzzy held the other girl up as he smiled at Yuk Yuk
and me. I nodded off, and then woke, nodded off and then woke. Soon I
noticed Paco on top of the girl he had been manhandling. Her legs were
spread outward, and a torn underwear twisted around an ankle. Paco’s
pants were below his knees and I could see his buttocks rise up and down
as he thrust into her, her weak moans more from the weight of the body
than anything else.
Ernie pulled up to Toll Drive. Yuk Yuk and Fuzzy pulled the other
girl out and down the slope to the field. Paco kept at it with the other girl
in the van. I clambered out, the cold humid air jolting me to my feet. Ernie
passed me the bottle of Silver Satin as he wobbled down to where Yuk
Yuk and Fuzzy were already situated. I looked back. I could hear Paco
coming, scratchy noises rising from his throat. The girl, who was
somewhere between 12 and 14 years old, had her arms laid out over her
head, her eyes closed, her mouth opened—unconscious, but as if in a
silent scream…. I didn’t want any part of it. Something filled my throat
and I puked around my shoes (122-123).
This scene is also significant because it comes just before Rodriguez recounts the story of
how he inadvertently dated a prostitute named Roberta. He notes how he was repulsed by
her after he realized what she did for a living. Later he experiences the same kind of
revulsions at another rape he witnesses. In short, these scenes suggest both a normative
construction and presumption of Latina sexuality and an inability, on the part of
Rodríguez, to establish healthy relationships with women.

50
Thomas, as noted above, similarly provides a significant narrative discourse about
his process of becoming hombre or “becoming a man” vis-a-vis the sexual conquest of
women of color. In the game “copping drawers,” Thomas tells the story of how his
friends in the neighborhood would congregate and, through their storytelling, collectively
re-experience the sexual conquest of the young women in their neighborhood. Thus,
integral to “becoming hombre” was a sexually charged homosociality and bonding over
the real or fictive subjugation of women. This process also included internalizing a
hegemonic model of masculinity
15
that governed everything from one’s particular
performance of masculinity to the politics of penetration. Piri writes:
At thirteen or fourteen we played a new game—copping girls’ drawers. It
became part of our street living—and sometimes a messy part. Getting
yourself a chick was a rep builder. But I felt that bragging to other fellas
about how many cherries I’d cracked or how many panties came down on
rooftops or back yards was nobody’s business but my own, and besides, I
was afraid my old lady would find out and I’d get my behind wasted. And
anyway it was better to play mysterious with the guys at bullshit sessions,
just play it cool as to who and how you copped.

It was all part of becoming hombre, of wanting to have a beard to shave, a
driver’s license, a draft card, a ‘stoneness’ which enabled you to go into a
bar like a man. Nobody really digs a kid. But a man—cool. Nobody can
tell you what to do and nobody better. You’d smack him down like
Whiplash does in the cowboy flick or really light him up like Scarface in

51
that gangster picture—swoon, crack, bang, bang, bang—short nose, snub
nose pistol, and a machine gun, and a poor fuckin’ loud mouth is laid out.

That was the way I felt. And sometimes what I did, although it was real
enough, was only a pale shadow of what I felt (15-16).
What is also important to note about these two particular Chicano and Latino
writer/activists is the ways in which they describe these rites of passage into manhood
and the models for masculinity they invoke as part of the development of their
Chicano/Latino nationalist consciousness; specifically, they suggest the ways these
scenes become antithetical but integral to their nationalist (i.e. the gang nation vs.
Chicano vs. U.S. nationalisms) consciousness. For Rodriguez, sexual violence in the form
of rape functions to solidify his relationships with Paco, Yuk Yuk, and Fuzzy while for
Thomas, his emergence into manhood is facilitated by recounting stories of sexual
“conquest” that lead to his imagining himself as a cowboy or as a Hollywood gangster.
Moreover, Brown’s analysis of sexual violence in these texts is very accurate;
nonetheless, her argument that such violence “mirrors oppressive facets of the dominant
culture’s construction of nation” alone ignores the context of U.S. imperialism and the
foundations of settler colonialism in fashioning these masculinities, sexualities, and
identities for Thomas and Rodríguez. This reframing of Brown’s analysis of sexual
violence as it relates to imperialism and settler colonialism, I believe, reveals her
assumption that “violence,” particularly sexual violence against women of color, has its
roots in the nation rather than in imperialism/colonialism. In reframing these texts, the
representation of sexual violence in them formulate a connected and often-reproduced

52
narrative of colonialism—through violence against women of color—in addition to U.S.
narratives of national development. In other words, the reproduction of such narratives
and their contiguity in these texts function, much like Benedict Anderson has argued, to
form the primary basis for a “taken-for-granted” worldview with respect to nation-
building and nationalism—the subjugation and oppression of women by men—in order
to solidify a homosociality that is integral to that type of nationalism. Nonetheless, such a
framing underscores the idea that imperialism is formulated in transnational contexts, and
colonialism and racist heteropatriarchal nationalisms are localized/regionalized
articulations of these same logics and processes of an always already transnational
imperialist worldview.
Therefore, the tension and ambiguity present in each writer’s attempt to navigate
U.S. and Latino (gang) national narratives provide insight for dismantling or at least
undermining the roots of white racist heteropatriarchal logics embedded in both—an
insight that begins with reframing sexual violence against women of color as part of a
transnational imperialist phenomenon. This tension and ambiguity in the autobiography
as it articulates an individual subjectivity suggest much like Donald Pease that these
autobiographical narratives become “new geographies” where the “retrieval of forgotten
histories” “pass back and forth between disparate cultural systems” to formulate new
postnational subjectivities (Rethinking American Studies after “US Exceptionalism,” 20).
Rather than construing the territorial nation-state as the instrument for evaluating
and representing America’s global inter-relationships, this transnational model called for
the reconceptualization of social movements as models for transnational understandings
of cultural and political processes as passing back and forth between disparate cultural

53
systems, whose analyses required the retrieval of forgotten histories and the imagining of
new geographies” (Rethinking American Studies after “US Exceptionalism,” 20). As a
result, the representations in the very masculinist/nationalist texts by Thomas and
Rodríguez present, at the very least, multidimensional Chicano figures—figures that
attempt to deal problematically with their participation in particular systems of state and
imperialist oppressions. For Thomas, this attempt comes through writing in the context of
prison as an expressly “non-national” subject; and, for Rodriguez, this comes through
leveling critiques of the school, prison and police systems as a participant in the Chicano
movement.
The trajectory of these narratives from Latino gang member or “delinquent
citizen” to poets and anti-gang proponents necessitate a distancing from and disavowal of
gangs, gang violence, and this form of subjectivity. This distancing, therefore,
symbolically assimilates these writers into the larger U.S. liberal narrative of
development and functions similarly to what Jared Sexton outlines as “an
institutionalized complicity with the structures of white supremacy” (2009). Of course,
this is not an endorsement of gangs, gang violence, or a privileging of prison as a site of
resistance to U.S. national narratives. I point to these examples of resistance to sexual
violence, on the part of Piri Thomas and Luis Rodríguez, and the way the prison
industrial complex attempts a state intervention to force gang subjects into the larger
national narrative of liberal development through the discourse of rehabilitation as
examples of the possibility that the nation-state can be challenged as the privileged site of
identity-formation for Chicanas/os and Latinas/os.

54
Of course, these particular Chicano/Latino gang subjects have posed such
problems for the state since at least the 1940s with the emergence of the figure of El
Pachuco—the ancestor of modern Chicano/Latino gang members. The triangulation of
these different subjects (Chicano/Latino gang member, nationalist, and individual
subjects) stems from the way the figure of El Pachuco has been deployed as a symbol of
resistance in the Chicana/o Latina/o community. Luis Leal (and I agree to a certain
extent) argues that the pachuco (and, by extension, the cholo/gang figure) is the precursor
to the Chicano. As such, this particular identity is integral to understanding where and
how Chicano men can begin to articulate different types of nationalism.
Piri Thomas and Luis Rodríguez’s narratives therefore launch effective yet
troubling critiques of State violence and the legacies of U.S. imperialism and white
supremacy as they relate to Chicanos/Latinos in the United States. Thomas’ narrative
focuses, as the above quote indicates, on his own interiority and subjectivity as it is
affected by racist, heteropatriarchal logics in the U.S. while Rodríguez’s narrative seems
to be broadly focused on his own subjectivity but also the subjectivity of those around
him. These different foci, then, result in different but related critiques. In Thomas’
narrative, the reader follows him on his journey from El Barrio to the South (Texas) and
back. In Rodríguez’s narrative, the reader is offered controlled scenes and interactions of
different people that lead to a critique of State apparatuses. Ultimately, this reveals the
ways in which the development even of subaltern nationalist positions/subjectivities
“mirror and expose some of the most oppressive facets of dominant culture’s construction
of nation” (Brown xvii). Chicano/Latino cultural nationalism and masculinity continues
to develop and assert itself at the expense of women’s [especially Chicana/Latina

55
women’s] bodies though sexual violence and this violence continues to function to make
“conquerors” of common men and solidify homosocial relationships between them.
What remains, therefore, is a complex negotiation for Chicanos like Rodríguez
whose narratives all involve a coming to a political consciousness without so easily
divesting themselves from the logics of coloniality and the traumas (i.e. the physical,
psychological, and sexual violence) that come with them, and the “Racism… [that] they
dug into your psyche with one little look of contempt [emphasis added] or their nose
would flare as you passed them as if they had smelled dirt” (Stavans, 351); what remains
is a struggle that needs to be waged on the basis of claiming and asserting one’s own
subjectivity. It is a fight for self-determination.
Chicano/Latino Subjectivity: Radical Autobiographics as Decolonial Practice
The consensus among these scholars is that national boundaries are generally
superficial and necessarily encompass a diverse array of people based on a constellation
of identity markers such as class, race, culture, etc. Nationalism, therefore, functions as
an ideological basis for creating a forceful but fictive national cohesion.
Obviously, such deployment of nationalism as a method of creating cohesion in
the Chicano and Latino communities was strategic in the 1960s and 1970s; and, it was a
necessary response to the processes of “deterritorialization” and the erasures described by
José David Saldívar. Since then, however, Chicana/o and Latina/o scholars have leveled
effective critiques of this form of cultural nationalism. Here, I am thinking of Betita
Martinez, Alma García, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s scholarship in particular. Importantly,
these scholars articulate and theorize a Chicano/a and Latina/o identity that is not
constitutive of any homogeneous nation-state (especially not a masculinist nation-state)

56
but one that is culturally, ethnically and politically constructed by a diverse and queer
community of color (Anzaldúa, Arteaga). Such attempts to articulate a cultural/ethnic
identity that is not constitutive of the nation-state (i.e. a postnational
16
identity) have
arguably been disrupted by expressions of state violence,
17
including war, imperialism,
imprisonment, and Chicano/Latino nationalism itself. The subsequent collective trauma
18

from such violence has formed a material and embodied layer of both the Chicana/o and
Latina/o experience and identity in the United States.
In addition, such a position—where identities are influenced, if not formed, in
large part by collective trauma and the resistance to such trauma—presupposes a
collective experience and memory like the Chicana/o Latina/o experience. Consequently,
while memory is generally conceived of as an individual’s recollection of an event or
experience, it has also been adeptly theorized as collective or social memory
19
. Within
these theoretical parameters, I argue that Chicana/o and Latina/o identity is formed at the
intersection of contested memory/memories that are best represented in the
autobiographies of Piri Thomas and Luis J. Rodríguez, precisely because their Chicano
and Latino identities and literary works are formed in response to, and concomitantly
independent of, large-scale historical events like colonialism, conquest, and imperialism.
These works are also Chicano/Latino nationalist cultural productions that have
been affected by, and have themselves effected, acts of epistemic violence that stem from
positing a unified national subject that is based on a racist, heterosexual, settler-
colonialist, patriarchal nation-state modeling of the U.S. This subjectivity results in the
formulation of what Rosa Linda Fregoso calls the “transcendental revolutionary Chicano
[and Latino male] subject”—one that has both challenged and reproduced these

57
ideological structures of oppression. Furthermore, the tension between the development
of a “transcendental,” unified subjectivity and a nationalist Chicano and Latino
subjectivity is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the genre of Chicano and Latino
autobiography because this genre forces an individual to discursively inscript themselves
into a larger discourse about belonging and exclusion from a particular context or
community. That is, “life-writing” but especially autobiography is about providing a
social context for an individual’s actions or events. With respect to racialized subjects in
the United States, however, their very individual subjectivity is always challenged by
dominant cultural, linguistic, legal, social, and nationalist discourses. As such, where
David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe would mark culture as the site of contestation, I would
suggest here that the genre of Chicana/o Latina/o autobiography becomes the medium
through which Chicana/o Latina/o culture resists racist U.S. narratives of national
development (1). Nevertheless, because these texts, as Monica Brown argues, appropriate
the discourse of citizenship and nationalism, they begin to unwittingly perpetuate the
logic of liberalism and the development of a modern subjectivity tied to a neocolonialist
development of capitalism and bourgeois nationalism so that they are at once sites of
contestation and technologies of resistance.
Radical Chicano/Latino Autobiographics
Therefore, Chicano/Latino nationalist identity formation and the resulting
discourses on race and gender become a central part of the narratives for Thomas and
Rodríguez’s autobiographies. Meanwhile, the generic form also becomes significant to
these discourses because of the synecdochic logic of race and the embedded tensions of
an always already racialized self through writing an autobiography in the U.S. Note that

58
the autobiography is generally a narrative representation of the self—of course, this
notion is troubled by postmodernist readings and approaches to the genre (Gilmore
1994)—but the synecdochic logic of race suggests that there can theoretically be no
unified representation of the individual self in narratives framed by racialized and
gendered subjects. Consequently, it is my contention that these autobiographies are
cultural expressions of individual sites of contradiction that represent the “effects of an
always uneven expansion [of neocolonialism] but [are sites] that cannot be subsumed by
the logic of commodification” (Lloyd and Lowe 1) or liberalism. Therefore, I suggest
these autobiographies become the sites of both the development of subaltern
Chicano/Latino subjectivities and the reproduction of the logic of a narrative of liberal
development that necessitates a discourse about nation and citizenship.
Thus, representing the self necessitates a location and a context for making that
subjectivity intelligible while the discourse of race simultaneously offers a continual
challenge to any discursive articulation of that individual self in the neocolonial
situation—especially of the self as it relates to the formation of the citizen-subject. In this
respect, Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Always Running (1993) form a political
resistance to dominant discourses that work to negate their individual subjectivity
through their use of the genre of autobiography. The opening scene in the prologue of
Down These Means Streets (1967) best reflects the processes through which these writers
articulate their subject positions through and against a narrative of liberal development.
Thomas writes, “YEE-AH!! Wanna know how many times I’ve stood on a rooftop and
yelled out to anybody: ‘Hey, World—here I am. Hallo, World—this is Piri. That’s me. ‘I
wanna tell ya I’m here—you bunch of mother-jumpers—I’m here, and I was recognition,

59
whatever that mudder-fuckin word means’” (ix). Leigh Gilmore notes these tensions are
embedded in the “politics of writing in the first person” (4). Therefore, Thomas and
Rodríguez, according this synechdochic logic of race, come to represent themselves and
all Chicanos/as and Latinas/os as the “part [that] stands in for the whole” in their
autobiographies. More importantly, while they attempt to resolve the tension between
articulating an individual subjectivity in the context of the broader U.S. social structure,
their Chicano/Latino “self” is also being discursively constructed in and by the
autobiography. Consequently, then, much like with many writers of color, their
individual and “collective” identities arguably attempt to work through a loss/desire of
this individual subjectivity—a subjectivity that is a result of racist heteropatriarchal
logics tied to a narrative of liberal development—through their own reproduction of such
logics of domination, which also indicates a non-hegemonic resistive vein of these
literary texts.
Certainly, this negotiation of individual representation through the genre of
autobiography and the effects of racialization vis-à-vis the racial hierarchy in the United
States lead to an ambivalence about one’s identity/self, and forces these subaltern
subjects to develop what DuBois famously refers to as a “double consciousness” and
dueling subjectivities. Nevertheless, Thomas and Rodríguez attempt to resolve such
ambivalence by actively critiquing and challenging the ideological and repressive state
apparatuses in place—as these apparatuses primarily function to negate their subjectivity
and reduce them to the sum of the parts of a constructed and contested racial Other.
Additionally, they begin to unmask the racialization of their own masculinities as they
relate to and perpetuate a white, racist heteropatriarchy through their subscription to

60
Chicano/Latino nationalist identities. Ultimately, however, these texts are inadvertently
invested in a narrative of liberal development and reproduce—through the development
of a Chicano/Latino nationalist consciousness—a white racist, heteropatriachal logic of
domination. The tension, therefore, between the liberal individualist self and how that
self is refracted through the lens of race in the U.S. as a “collective” self and racial Other,
simultaneously interrupts these constructions and threatens to assimilate them insofar as
each, separately, provides an alibi for the white supremacist, totalizing logics of
heteropatriarchy.
In Gang Nation (2002), Monica Brown points out the many correspondences
between Puerto Rican and Chicano literature—particularly, urban narratives—and
provides critical insights with regard to the questions Thomas’ and Rodríguez’s texts
raise about the nation, State violence and citizenship as products of a shared colonialism.
In this framework, Brown contends gang membership functions to reproduce notions of
national belonging and citizenship. She writes: “The gang members depicted in these
works attempt to negotiate national spaces and places, fighting wars abroad and ‘at home’
all the while caught between the United States and Mexico, their gangs and their
families” (Brown 37). She also claims: “Reading Rodriguez’s account of gang life in
East LA, it is impossible to overlook the ways both gang life and cultural nationalism
fulfill similar needs for urban youth—for community, loyalty, respect, and a sense of
allegiance to specific territory or place out of which their identity arises” (Brown 70).
Brown, in other words, understands Chicano/Latino gang membership to be alternative
models of national belonging and citizenship as both indicate a sense of community

61
(Anderson), belonging, loyalty, and lead to a form of nationalism. Furthermore, Brown
writes:
[M]y analysis of these writers leads me to the preliminary conclusion that
these youth have not simply turned their backs on an idealized notion of
what it means to be a good and upstanding citizen of America. Rather,
they have sought in many ways to emulate existing structures from which
they are excluded, including access to ‘equal citizenship,’ defined by
critical race theorists as the principle that ‘every individual is
presumptively entitled to be treated by the organized society as a
respected, responsible, and participating member’ (xvi); and, she adds:
These ‘counter-nations’ [gangs] simultaneously mirror and expose some
of the most oppressive facets of dominant culture’s construction of nation
and an American ‘national symbolic’” (xvii).
Brown’s argument, however, relies heavily on the notion of citizenship—a notion that
necessarily requires a legitimizing structure (the nation-state) to concretize subjecthood.
In this respect, Brown situates these narratives in a historicism that takes as its model a
narrative of national and subject development that proceeds from “barbarity” (i.e. these
figures as gang members) to civility and citizenship. Brown’s analysis, then, ultimately
seems to be attempting to write Chicano/Latino gangs, and by extension, Chicana/o
Latina/o communities, into the master narrative of the American (mythological) national
body and, thereby, reinforce one of the great myths of American identity—that America
is a “nation of nations,” and that it is inclusive or progressive.

62
In short, because the genre forces Thomas and Rodríguez to articulate the
interiority of their subjectivities through their Chicano/Latino nationalist identities, the
genre of autobiography becomes the terrain “in which politics, culture, and the economic
form an inseparable dynamic” (Lloyd and Lowe 1). Furthermore, the autobiography as a
genre allows for the development of ambiguous and contradictory subjectivities for
Thomas and Rodríguez—primarily through their development of a fantastical
citizen/subjectivity that reinforces the narrative of American exceptionalism through their
productions of the “national Other” (Pease 5). Donald Pease argues:
“As collectively experienced fantasies [i.e. the fantasies whereby subjects
give up their power to the state to govern through various relations—
democratic, authoritarian, socialist, etc.], these narratives extended the
reach of the state regulatory mechanisms into the individual psyche where
these fantasies have historically performed functions that are both
extensive and complexly interrelated.” Earlier noting, “Metanarratives
recast the reason of the state as teleology (a horizon of narrative
expectations emanating from a national origin and organized by a national
purpose) and thereby induce the state’s subject to collude in their own
subjection” (4-5).
In other words, the development and articulation of these Chicano/Latino autobiographies
as nationalist narratives functions to reinscribe the fantastical relations between the
nation-state (be it Aztlán, Latino gangs, or the United States) and its subjects. Therefore,
these layered narratives of national development in Thomas and Rodríguez’s
autobiographies reveal how these narratives have been internalized as an extension of the

63
“naturalized” reach of state power and expressed through the subjectivities of these
writers.
Additionally, the reproduction and appropriation of the discourse of U.S.
nationalism by Thomas and Rodríguez resemble the structure of “fractal geometry” that
Wai-Chee Dimock borrows from Benoit Mandelbrot and uses to describe the interrelated
global “kinship structures” of genre. Dimock explains:
“Fractal is the geometry of the irregular and the microscopic, what gets
lost in a big picture. It does what aggregating and averaging cannot. To
aggregate and to average, Mandelbrot [the creator of fractal geometry]
says, is like wrapping tin foil around a sponge: the former does ‘measure’
the latter, but only by completely obliterating its texture…. Mandelbrot’s
geometry of the miniscule is, in fact, matched by a geometry of what gets
‘larger and larger without bound.’…. These two—finite parameters and
infinite unfolding—go hand in hand. The latter is embedded in the former,
coiled in the former, and can be released only when the former is broken
down into fractional units…. Scalar opposites here generate a dialectic
that makes the global an effect of the grainy” (88-89).
While Dimock uses fractal geometric relationships to understand the kinship structures
and interrelatedness of genre, this analytic can also be applied to understanding the
relationships between nationalisms and narratives of nationalism. That is, there is a way
in which the nationalisms rooted in a resistance to the state like Chicano/Latino
nationalisms are “fractal” nationalisms—they are the “scalar opposite” of the dominant
nationalism. More importantly, as we examine the miniscule elements of these

64
nationalisms, we uncover the dialectical relationships to the larger structure of white,
heteropatriarchal nationalism in the U.S. This also mirrors the relationship between the
individual and the community and the relationship between an individual subjectivity and
collective identity—the tension embedded in the autobiographical texts for Thomas and
Rodríguez.
In the end, perhaps the reproduction of the conditions of conquest and the racial
discourse that comes with such texts are attempts by men of color to work through their
own problematic masculine identities. What I am saying is that men of color are forced to
re-create or reproduce the conditions of the colonial encounter because they have
internalized a particular white racist heteropatriachal and colonial “model of manhood.”
Paulo Freire writes:
But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed,
instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or
‘sub-oppressors.’ The very structure of their thought has been conditioned
by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they
were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be
oppressors. This is their model for humanity. This phenomenon derives
from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential
experience, adopt an attitude of ‘adhesion’ to the oppressor (Freire 27).
As a result, the reproduction of these conditions and the subsequent subjugation of
women of color by men of color and intra-racial violence, etc. can only be addressed by a
re-structuring of thought or reasserting one’s own subjectivity through a process of de-
colonization. I will not suggest, as some, a return to a mythical, nostalgic place of

65
egalitarian indigenous origin; nor would I suggest that such an origin is somehow
“outside” of the capitalist, racial, and patriarchal systems that operate today. However,
what I am suggesting is that it is enough to begin at the point of difference, the point of
noting that those forms of oppression and subjugation are products of a white racist
heteropatriachal and settler colonialist nation-state, and that we should work toward a
remedy together. This, in the end, is a process of decolonization—a process of
recognizing the other and the self or of recognizing the self in the Other. The Nahuatl
called it “Inlakech” or “You are my other self.”

66

CHAPTER TWO
Chicano Gangs & Cinematic Art, Ideology, and Function

Since the early 1900s, with the development of modern film—from the
transformation of still pictures to moving pictures and, finally, to “talkies” in the United
States—filmmakers have been concerned with the function of film and critics have been
concerned with understanding its aesthetic value. Filmmakers might consider whether the
function of film is to represent and reproduce the beauty of nature, to hold a mirror up to
our society and expose our many contradictions, or by a greater imagination, present an
alternative view of the world. The critics aim to determine how well the filmmakers
succeeded in their representations. Therefore, both the critics and the filmmakers
respectively differ in their positions. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, posits that because
film is able to reproduce accurately the images and sounds found in the natural world,
film alone is capable of “holding the mirror up to nature” and reproducing reality (Mast
et al. 4). Yet, the anti-realist tradition in cinema opposes the view that the goal of film
and art is to imitate and reproduce the natural world. This tradition suggests that the
function of art and filmmaking is to “create a work of art [that] is not simply to copy the
world but to add another, and very special, object to the world” (Mast et al. 3). Other
anti-realists argue in addition that the work of art or film may not reproduce nature at all
or it may, in fact, distort nature.
Thus, much like the early development of literary studies and the many
discussions about aesthetic value, representations, and functions of literature, film has
undergone a similar trajectory. It importantly allows for “exploring the role of narrative

67
and story-telling not just through words but through images, objects, gestures, and the
invocation of a history of film itself” (Braudy x) and, in this respect, films are “enclosed”
constructions of the different worlds they represent. Yet, they can also be aesthetically
evaluated based on their narrative and visual “coherence”—the way many film critics
prefer to treat them. Nevertheless, film is a relatively new but dominant medium through
which, in addition to engaging with an evaluation of aesthetics and its narrative like in
literature, we also engage in visual and audio representations of culture and society
because films are cultural products.
Moreover, because films are cultural products, like literature, they have a
particular social and historical context. Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni understand
film to be “a particular product, manufactured within a given system of economic
relations” that is “transformed into a commodity, possessing exchange value, which is
realized by the sale of tickets and contracts” but is also “an ideological product of the
system…[of] capitalism” (683-684). They add, “every film is part of the economic
system [and] is also a part of the ideological system, for ‘cinema’ and ‘art’ are branches
of ideology” (684). Comolli and Narboni’s articulation of film as a cultural and economic
product, therefore, suggests that many analyses and receptions of film are based on an
assumed and unquestioned standard of aesthetics whose foundation is ideological. In
addition, Stuart Hall argues, “In modern societies, the different media are especially
important sites for the production, reproduction, and transformation of ideologies
[and]…institutions like the media are peculiarly central to matter since they are, by
definition, part of the dominant means of ideological production” (90). In this
framework, the film industry becomes an ideological apparatus precisely because it

68
explicitly and implicitly generates and disseminates images, concepts, sounds, and
narratives that mostly reinforce dominant ideologies and sometimes challenge them.
Furthermore, Robin Wood argues in “Ideology, Genre, Auteur” that, while films
are not “ideologically pure,” two ideal figures emerge from a set of American capitalist
ideological foundations in classic Hollywood films. The first is the “ideal male: the virile
adventurer, the potent untrammeled man of action”; and, the second is the ideal female:
wife and mother, perfect companion, the endlessly dependable mainstay of hearth and
home” (477). Wood also provides for the ideological flexibility that includes the
antithetical representations of these two figures that function nonetheless to reinforce the
same American capitalist ideology—one that is defined by a focus on private ownership
and enterprise, an “honest” work ethic reinforced by a “moral code,” heterosexual
marriage, the dichotomous relationships between nature/wilderness and city life/
“civilization;” and, finally, an ideology that is defined by the concept of “America as the
land where everyone is or can be happy” (477). In short, the development of film as an
art form and as a cultural/economic product impacts the sociological and teleological
foundations of American society by perpetuating a dominant heterosexual bourgeois
ideology to masses of people—especially in the United States.
Yet, while becoming conscious of and critiquing the ideological foundations of
film and filmmaking led to progressive changes in both production and content such as
the changes brought about by the emergence of Newsreel—the filmmaking branch of the
New Left—, such progressive changes often neglected the issues of race in favor of
focusing on issues of class and, at times, gender. Nonetheless, such a focus also forced
the emergence of other related organizations like Third World Newsreel that, according

69
to Cynthia Young, “sought to connect the conditions facing Black and Brown ghetto
dwellers with those facing colonized peoples around the globe. Poverty, police violence,
discrimination, and unemployment were depicted as local manifestations of a world wide
dynamic of exploitation between First and Third World nations” (32). These
organizations and their positions, however useful for contextualizing the conditions for
people of color in the U.S. in a global context, also glossed over the particularities of the
various ethnic communities they tried to represent. Ultimately, then, the need for focused
and concentrated scholarship that elucidates the particular situations of each community
of color has, until relatively recently, been met intermittently by Latino, Black, Asian,
and Native American scholars with respect to their own communities and their
representations in film.
For Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, Gary D. Keller’s Chicano Cinema (1985) and
Chon Noriega’s Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance (1992) offer two of
the earliest comprehensive scholarly treatments of Chicanos/as and Latinos/as in
Hollywood. Specifically, in Chicanos and Film, Noriega delineates the concurrent
development of alternative cinema practices in the Chicano community with the
ideological and practical shifts in film brought about by organizations like Third World
Newsreel mentioned above. He notes, “Since the late 1960s, Chicano filmmakers and
video artists have struggled to create an alternative to what they identified as ‘six decades
of abusive stereotypes’” (xix) in mainstream Hollywood films. He also writes that during
the 1960s and 1970s Chicano movement, Chicano films and television shows
simultaneously documented and represented the social and political unrest as it related to
Chicanos and Latinos. Later, he adds that Chicano filmmakers focused on the “history of

70
the Chicano experience before the Movement;” and, he argues that since the late 1970s,
Chicano cinema drew upon the social practices and other Chicana/o cultural productions
like literature, art, and music to formulate its themes. Noriega sums up the development
of Chicana/o alternative cinema practices since the 1960s as part of a cinema whose
foundation is the cultural production that was integral to the Chicano movement. Finally,
he argues that for contemporary Chicana/o cinema, such cultural products formed the
“lens” through which Chicanos envision cultural, social, and political resistance “since
the Reagan era” (xx) because Reagan cut off much of the public funding that supported
Chicana/o cinema.
Since Keller and Noriega’s seminal contributions to the field of Chicana/o and
Latina/o film studies, other scholars like Rosa Linda Fregoso and Charles Ramírez Berg
have continued to build upon the theoretical frameworks and positions originally
advanced by early Chicano and Chicana filmmakers who form the subjects of Keller and
Noriega’s works. Fregoso, for example, argues for a theoretical understanding of the
“emergence of a film culture by, about, and for Chicanas and Chicanos” (xiv). She
writes: “The trinity ‘by, for, [and] about’ [Chicanos in film] made sense at a particular
historical moment. In its embryonic stage, Chicano films could not be defined solely by
their contents, that is, in terms of the about, because historically many films dealing with
the Chicano experience, produced prior and during the Movement, were inadequate in
reflecting ‘our’ experience from ‘our’ perspective” (xvii). She adds that the function of
Chicano cinema has been to document a “social reality through oppositional forms of
knowledge about Chicanos” (xiv-xv). As a result, she focuses her theoretical positions on
Chicano cinema on its cultural politics despite the late move by some Chicana/o

71
filmmakers like Jesús Salvador Treviño to de-emphasize those politics in lieu of an
ownership or control over films through directing or producing films.
Charles Ramírez Berg’s Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, &
Resistance (2002) by contrast, shifts the focus from understanding and theorizing the
emergence of a Chicana/o and Latina/o cinema practice back to the representation of
Chicanos and Latinos in mainstream Hollywood film. In it, he argues, “Chicano
film…began specifically in opposition to the Hollywood paradigm, so [the] concentration
on its history seems not only reasonable but called for” (9). He adds, “there is the
interesting fact that [because] so much of Chicano cinema originated in the cradle of
mainstream studio cinema…one might consider Chicano cinema of the past thirty years
to have been mainstream American films’ ‘shadow cinema.’” (9). However, Ramírez
Berg’s overall argument posits that negative Latino images and imagery in Hollywood
films function as “part of a larger discourse on Otherness” to facilitate carrying out the
aims of U.S. imperialism. Additionally, he notes that in examining the “deep structure of
Hollywood cinema,” it becomes clear that the “standardized cinematic techniques, [and]
the accepted norms of ‘good’ filmmaking… all contribute to the totality of the image we
call a stereotype” (5) that formulates the premise of racial, sexual, gender, and class
difference/Otherness in the United States.
Rosa Linda Fregoso and Charles Ramírez Berg, then, represent some of the most
significant scholarship on Chicanos/as and Latinos/as in film and their positions represent
the different focal points through which to approach Chicano/Latino film studies: one
focused on film produced, directed and written by, about or for Chicanos in an attempt to
develop a theory about Chicana/o film culture, and the other focused on mainstream

72
Hollywood’s representations of Chicanos and Latinos in film. While their theoretical
focal points are different, they premise their critical positions in response to the same
history of negative representations of Latinos and Chicanos in film “beginning with the
early-twentieth-century ‘Greaser’ genre and on to the ‘Westerns,’ the ‘social problem’
genre, [and] up to the recent onslaught of ‘gangxploitation’ films” (Fregoso xvii). Most
importantly, both Fregoso and Ramírez Berg understand the role of cinema in
formulating—much like Benedict Anderson has argued with print culture—an “imagined
community” (Fregoso xxiii). Ramírez Berg understands the work of cinema to operate—
with respect to Chicano/Latino representations—as part of the ideological apparatus that
continues to justify U.S. imperialism through extending the ideological premises of the
Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. He writes, “The case of Latino stereotyping in
mass media involves a discourse that might be called ‘Latinism’” and argues that
Latinism is the process whereby the mass media in the United States represents Latinos in
such a way that “[justifies] the United States’ imperialistic goals” (4) with regard to Latin
America.
While I agree with Fregoso and Ramírez Berg that mainstream Hollywood films
function to reproduce and reinforce these U.S. imperialist, white supremacist, and
heteropatriarchal
20
logics of domination, no cultural product as Robin Wood has
suggested with film, is “ideologically pure.” In fact, Fregoso, in the conclusion to her
book The Bronze Screen (1993) articulates her own ambivalent positions in her analysis
of the film American Me (1992). She writes, “I find myself interpellated into
contradictory subject positions, as academic parlance would say it, positioned in a
welcomed-place of discomfort, yet also dis-appointed by this film text [American Me],

73
and, most of all, having to account for this heterogeneity in myself as a spectator” (124).
For Fregoso, such ambivalence arguably stems from two primary engagements with this
film. The first is that this film represents one of the most accurate portrayals of the
Chicano experience in prison and, therefore, is “brutally honest” (Fregoso 125) with
respect to its depictions. Through this lens, the content of the film becomes a real but
contentious aspect of the overall Chicano experience that Chicano cinema is supposed to
represent. The second is, to some degree, the way the film and Edward James Olmos (as
the director of the film) operate as vehicles for neoliberal and, at times, conservative
racist ideologies. These positions are perhaps most troubling for scholars like Fregoso
especially because American Me (1992) is a Chicano film. In other words, such a film
might be easier to dismiss, critique, and deconstruct if it were made about
Chicanos/Latinos rather than by and for them.
From Bandidos and Greasers to Gangsters:
Chicano Gangxploitation Films since the 1970s
It is precisely at this point of tension and ambivalence that I would like to begin
my own treatment of what Chicana/o and Latina/o filmmakers and scholars have noted is
the latest incarnation of the different racist “Latino” film genres in Hollywood: the
Chicano/Latino “gangxploitation” film. As Charles Ramírez Berg, David R. Maciel, and
others have noted, early negative representations of Chicanos and Latinos in film began
with the figures of the bandido, the greaser, the “Latin-lover,” and the peon but in the
1960s and 1970s, Hollywood gave rise to the Chicano/Latino gang film. Jesus Treviño
writes in his March 1985 article in Jumpcut:

74
What these stereotypes of the greasy bandit, the Latin lover, the dumb
peon, and the Mexican spitfire all have in common is that they reduce to a
one-sided, superficial and exaggerated depiction the real variety and depth
and complexity of a struggling people. Significantly, the underlying social
issues affecting Latino life in the United States have seldom been
addressed in Hollywood films, and hardly ever have Latinos been
portrayed as people in control of their lives, capable of standing up for
their rights, or having an interest in their own future…. In recent years
Latino youthful gang members have emerged in film as updated, modern
variants of the bandit type” (15, 1985).
Nonetheless, while it is clear that Chicano/Latino gang films are part of a contiguous
history of negative representations of Latinos in the United States, this particular genre of
film allows for ambiguities and tensions represented by Fregoso’s treatment of Edward
James Olmos’ American Me (1992) because it is a Chicano film and simultaneously
allows for an engagement of political difficulties in those films that seek to represent
Chicanos/Latinos in gang films
21
like Michael Pressman’s Boulevard Nights (1979).
Michael Pressman’s Boulevard Nights (1979), Edward James Olmos’s American
Me (1992) and Peter Bratt’s La Mission (2009) are part of another long tradition of
Hollywood Chicano/Latino gang films that arguably begins with the The Ring (1952),
proceeds to deal with the “gang problem” in Westside Story (1961), and ends with La
Mission (2009). In The Ring (1952), Lalo Rios plays Tomas “Tommy” Cantanios, a
former pachuco from East L.A. who, after being recruited by a boxing promoter, turns to

75
boxing as an attempt to escape poverty and the barrio. After showing promise, the
character Tomas Cantanios is renamed “Tommy Kansas” in a symbolic gesture that
suggests both a possibility for assimilation into mainstream white society and for
escaping the barrio. Nevertheless, “Tommy Kansas” fails to succeed as a boxer—
ironically, he is beat by another Latino boxer in Art Aragon—and, ultimately, fails to
escape the barrio. In addition, in one of the most critical scenes in the film, Tommy
Kansas and his friends are the subject of racist treatment on the part of a white waitress in
a restaurant in Beverly Hills. The waitress reluctantly serves Kansas and his friends water
and then ignores them in favor of serving white patrons. Anticipating trouble from
Kansas and his friends, she calls the police. When the police arrive, however, the cop
realizes that Kansas and his friends are being treated unfairly at the restaurant and he
forces the waitress to serve them. This film is certainly one of the few early Hollywood
“gang” films to portray Chicanos sympathetically —especially Chicano gang members—
but, in the end, the film’s overall message is that upward social mobility is not possible
for Chicanos even in a field (boxing) in which they normally succeed. And, as Jesus
Treviño points out, “the film needs an established Anglo authority figure who saves the
day” (16).
The key difference between early “gang films” like The Ring (1952) and later
Latino gang films like Pressman’s Boulevard Nights (1979) is that these latter films
remove the Anglo figures who function to introduce and reproduce a colonizing and
missionary logic to their plots. That is, the extent to which these films offer a narrative of
redemption is limited by the absence of a “white savior” figure and, by extension, these
narratives reinforce the notion that Chicanos and Latinos cannot “save themselves.” This

76
is a salient point given that the Chicano and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s bridges
these films and, therefore, many of the positions of these films reflect the liberal ethos of
the Civil Rights era and a post-Civil Rights era conservative response. Specifically, their
narratives reflect a shift that paralleled the shift from the early 1960s white liberal-
endorsed positions that sought to bring about social change non-violently (Robby’s
dramatic disavowal of his gang membership after falling in love with a white woman) to
the late 1960s militancy of organizations like the Brown Berets and the Black Panthers
(Boulevard Nights); these narratives also resonate with the subsequent backlash that led
to the elections of Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan. Equally important is that
films like The Ring (1952), Westside Story (1961), Walk Proud (1979) and Boulevard
Nights (1979) are films that are made about Chicanos/Latinos rather than films made by
Chicanos/Latinos—a distinction that most Chicano/Latino film scholars argue affects the
sociopolitical aspects of the film. Nevertheless, my analysis will focus on Michael
Pressman’s Boulevard Nights (1979) Edward James Olmos’s American Me (1992) and
Peter Bratt’s La Mission (2009) precisely because these narratives treat Chicano/Latino
gangs, their discourses, and their representations as part of an enclosed cinematic world.
My endeavor in this chapter, therefore, is to focus less on the aesthetic and
production elements of film and more on the ideological components of films as visual
and narrative reproductions of a particular ideology or ideologies. My aim is to examine
particular filmic representations of Chicano/Latino gang members as cultural and
ideological signifiers in the films Boulevard Nights (1979), American Me (1992), and La
Mission (2009) because these films, as examples of a tradition of cinematic realism,
highlight the critical distinction that needs to be made with respect to the performance of

77
different types of Chicano masculinities and embodiments of Chicano sexuality.
Moreover, my aim is to also articulate how such performances in these films relate to real
structures of oppression like poverty in the barrio and the conditions of the prison system.
I posit that these representations purposefully reinforce heteronormative and racist
narratives related to Chicano/Latino gang members because these figures represent a type
of Chicano masculinity that is easily characterized as the violent antithesis of a “benign”
hegemonic white masculinity; in this way, Chicano/Latino gang films, both by and about
Latinos, operate in the U.S. imaginary as part of the ideological apparatus—Hollywood
cinema—that serves to maintain racist, heteropatriarchal, and class-based structures of
oppression.
Boulevard Nights: Everything happens on the boulevard and the boulevard happens at
night.
On September 10, 1978, Gregg Kilday of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “This
year will go down in the record books as the year of the gang movie.” Then, he goes on
to detail how, in addition to the film Gang! (Later renamed Walk Proud) and On the
Edge, six other “gang” films were either currently being filmed or in the planning stages
of being filmed. Among the other six films was a script called American Me written by
Floyd Mutrux that stemmed from his “study of a Chicano gang leader.” According to
Kilday, Mutrux’s American Me is credited with inspiring that round of gang films
including Boulevard Nights (see figure 1 below). Thus, from its inception, Michael
Pressman’s Boulevard Nights (1979) was connected not only to American Me
22
(1992)
but also to the controversial film Walk Proud (1979). While I will return to the

78
Figure 1. Warner Bros. Boulevard Nights Advertisement (1979).
connection between Boulevard Nights and American Me later, Boulevard Nights’
relationship to Gang!/Walk Proud (1979) is significant because these two films emerged
amidst a contentious conversation about the representations of Chicanos in Hollywood
(carried out in a series of articles by the Los Angeles Times in 1979) and the question of
accurately portraying the conditions of the predominantly Chicano barrios of Los
Angeles. According to Georgia Jeffries, “Aware of the barrage of publicity and tension
that greeted the filmmakers of Gang!
23
, both producers [Bill Benenson and Tony Bill]
took great care to keep a low profile in the community.” Jeffries adds that because the
producers operated from “within the community,” the “result was a completely Hispanic
cast, including Chicano extras” (60). Despite the “low profile” and operating from
“within the community,” Boulevard Nights (1979) still manages to reproduce racist and

79
heterosexual logics of domination. Moreover, the sexual politics of this film work to
reinforce and maintain a heteronormative world view by centering the nuclear family as
the site of such "normativity."
Boulevard Nights (1979) was written by Desmond Nakano—a UCLA-educated,
Japanese American from Boyle Heights. He is also wrote the screenplays for Last Exit to
Brooklyn (1989), American Me (1992) and, White Man’s Burden (1995). In an article
about Boulevard Nights (1979), Nakano says that it is “a contemporary urban ethnic look
at Los Angeles’ mean streets’” (Kilday L23), and Georgia Jeffries writes, “The plight of
the brothers, Raymond and Chuco, cuts so close to the bone of the real lives of thousands
in East Los Angeles” (59). Boulevard Nights (1979), then, was billed as a primary
example of cinematic realism. It is a movie that follows the lives of two brothers—
Raymond played by Richard Yñiguez and Chuco Avila played by Danny de la Paz—who
are from the very real barrio of East Los Angeles. And, these brothers, according to the
script, are on divergent paths. The older brother, Raymond, wants to get out of the barrio
and one day open up a car shop of his own while his younger brother, Chuco, seems
hopelessly tied to the barrio in an otherwise very nihilistic depiction of Chicano gang life
in East Los and these differences are readily apparent from the early scenes of the film.
From the beginning of the film, Nakano positions Raymond as the model of
“Chicano success” only insofar as he reproduces a normative white racist ideology. For
example, in the opening scene of the film, two Latino gang members from the fictional
11
th
Street gang come into Varrio Grande Vista (VGV) “territory” and cross out their
placa (the spray painted gang moniker) on a wall. When Chuco, Big Happy and the other
members of VGV catch Toby, the 11
th
Street gang member who crossed them out, they

80
beat him until Raymond intervenes. Initially, in this scene, the camera stays focused on
the beating and the audience only hears Raymond’s disembodied voice over. “Hey!” he
shouts. “That’s enough!” Then, the camera cuts to Raymond who is standing on the top
of the embankment under the bridge but above everyone else in the scene. In the very
next scene, Raymond is lifting weights in his yard. These two opening scenes, taken
together, are supposed to metaphorically represent and reinforce Raymond’s strength in
the film. The narrative, in this way, positions Raymond as the regulatory force of the
gang and over Chuco. His disembodied voice at the beginning of the film gives him a
god-like introduction to the audience. He is, in Freudian terms, the super ego of this
Chicano world and represents not only the ideological ‘normativity’ of Chicano East L.A
but only insofar as they shadow the broader ideological positions of the U.S. racist,
capitalist state.
Moreover, Chuco, as Raymond’s antithesis in their representations of a symbolic
economic and ideological order in the film, functions to reinforce these same racist,
capitalist ideological positions. In the section of the film titled “Chuco Gets a Job,” for
example, Raymond sets up an interview for Chuco. But Chuco is not prepared for the job
interview and, when Gil, the Chicano auto shop owner asks Chuco if he can work full
time or part time, Chuco is at a loss for words. Then, he asks Chuco if he is still in school.
Again, Chuco is at a loss for words. Gil continues to press Chuco for answers and when
Raymond attempts to intervene, Gil stops him. Finally, Chuco explains that he was
kicked out of school for pulling out his “filero” or knife when a fight breaks out at
school. Gil asks Chuco to produce his filero. When he does, Gil examines it and, as he
looks it over, the close-up of the knife reveals the initials, V.G.V. for Varrio Grande

81
Vista—both the name of an actual street in Boyle Heights and the fictional name of the
gang to which Chuco and Raymond belong. Finally, Gil folds up the knife, offers Chuco
a job, hands him the knife, and says, “Not here. I don’t want this thing in my shop.”
This scene is telling because it suggests that the “honest work ethic” described as
part of a capitalist ideology by Robin Wood is incongruent with gang life as it is
represented by Chuco’s VGV-engraved knife. Additionally, Chuco’s inability to answer
Gil’s questions about work suggests his unintelligibility of the labor system and a lack of
literal and economic cultural capital. The implication is that Latinos join gangs because,
like Chuco, they do not have the social, economic, and cultural skills required to obtain
gainful employment. Such a position, however, ignores the larger structural issues like
poverty, failing schools, and institutional racism that are greater contributors to potential
gang membership but functions to strengthen the representation of Raymond as a model
for Chicano success. This scene also reinforces an assimilationist neoliberal narrative that
posits participation in a capitalist job market as the answer to the “Chicano gang
problem” rather than the cause of such problems. Simply put, the narrative suggests that
escape from the conditions of the barrio is only possible through participation in the
“legitimate” economic and political structure of the United States.
In addition, the film’s soundtrack sets a tone that suggests that Chuco and Latino
gang members like him are socially and economically backward. In the section of the
film titled “Gettin’ Ready for the Boulevard,” the camera shifts quickly and moves
between scenes of Raymond washing his car in the yard of their house and scenes of
Chuco ironing his shirt inside the house. In these shifts between the two central
characters of the film, the soundtrack changes in order to convey different “feelings”

82
about each character. When the camera focuses on Raymond who is outside of the house
polishing his 1970 Monte Carlo, the musical soundtrack is contemporary disco music;
when the images of Chuco inside the house are shown, the music is “oldies but goodies”
or doo wop
24
. These musical shifts are important because the different genres signify both
progress and contemporaneousness and a regressive nostalgia in the Chicano and Anglo
imagination. Disco music is specifically deployed in these scenes to signal this logic of
progress and assimilation, while oldies music is deployed to signal a holding on to the
past, a nostalgia, and regression for Chicanos. In fact, in this scene, their mother, Carmen
Avila, played by Betty Carvalho, comes outside of the house to complain to Raymond
that Chuco has been “ironing the same shirt for half an hour.” In other words, the Doo
Wop oldies music and the process of ironing the same shirt for thirty minutes collectively
reinforce the regression and “resistance to progress” that Chuco and other Latino gang
members represent.
Nonetheless, the deployment of oldies music in the film seems also to allow for
greater affective variability for Chuco than it does for Raymond. Because Chuco’s
speaking lines are fairly limited in the film, the music facilitates the expression of love,
loss, and grief for him. In the scene where Raymond confronts Chuco for missing his
wedding, Chuco, again unable fully to articulate his feelings, relies on the soundtrack to
convey complex emotions like anger, disappointment, and remorse. Chuco tells
Raymond, “I wanted to be at your wedding and everything, man. I wanted to be there.
But I just get real mad sometimes and I don’t know what to do…so then I fuck up and do
something dumb.” All the while, the music in the film shifts from the theme song for the
film to an “oldies” style of music at the emotional climax of this scene. In this respect,

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the oldies music also functions to soundtrack a carnalismo that is represented not only by
the relationship between Chuco and Raymond but also by the relationship between Chuco
and his homeboys.
This carnalismo through oldies music also resonates with the broader
Chicano/Latino community in East Los Angeles where such music is arguably a literal
soundtrack for daily life. The song, “Tonite, Tonite” (1957) by The Mello Kings, that
plays while Chuco is ironing his shirt in an earlier scene, in fact appears in East Side
Story Volume 8—a compilation of music that is and was widely circulated in East L.A.
Oldies music, then, for Chicana/os and Latina/os in general, and for Chuco in particular,
becomes one of the avenues through which complex emotions are articulated,
transmitted, and supported in the absence of those discourses and modalities in
mainstream popular expressions like Hollywood films.
Despite such a recuperative reinterpretation of the film’s soundtracking of Chuco
and other Chicanos, other narrative and cinematic elements of the film continue to
juxtapose these brothers in order to reinforce the same capitalist, white racist,
heteropatriarchal logics of domination. As we continue to follow the Avila brothers
through the “mean streets” of East L.A., down Whittier Boulevard and down their
respective paths to manhood in this coming of age barrio narrative, it becomes apparent
that Raymond’s escape from the barrio is not only locked up in his desire to own his own
auto body shop (a capitalist endeavor) but also in his relationship with Denise “Shady”
Landeros played by Marta Dubois.
The Marriage Cure to the Chicano/Latino Gang Problem
The heteronormative marriage plot between Shady and Raymond is spurned on

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by, at least, two critical moments in the film. The first is when Shady confronts Raymond
about cruising the boulevard and it is part of the larger sequence of scenes titled, “Gettin’
Ready for the Boulevard,” “Cruisin’ the Boulevard,” “The Hop,” and, “Shady and
Raymond Break Up.” The second cinematic moment is simply part of the sequence titled,
“Raymond Proposes.” In the first film sequence, Raymond and Chuco pick up Shady
from her house on the way to the Boulevard, Chuco is seated in the front seat of
Raymond’s Monte Carlo. As Raymond and Shady approach the car to get in and she sees
Chuco, Shady raises her objection to cruising the boulevard and says she expected them
(Raymond and Shady) to go have dinner. Raymond explains that Chuco’s car is “busted”
and that they will only drop him off on the boulevard. As they turn to get in the car,
Raymond tells Chuco, “Hey, carnal, let Shady have shotgun [the front passenger seat],
man.” Chuco, clearly unhappy about being displaced, moves to the back seat. Shady then
says hello to Chuco and he ignores her. In the very next sequence, Raymond decides to
“hop” his car using his hydraulics against another lowrider for money. Shady quickly
realizes that Raymond cannot completely abandon the world of low riding and she walks
away from his car hopping competition. When Raymond realizes she has walked away,
he chases after her and finds her on the boulevard. He pleads for her to come back but she
eventually breaks up with him.
The second significant cinematic moment in the marriage plot happens when
Raymond decides to visit Shady at work after she breaks up with him. The scene begins
with Raymond crossing one of the many bridges that lead from East Los Angeles into
downtown. This act of crossing the bridge is intended to signal to the audience that
Raymond is crossing both a literal and symbolic boundary—one that leads out from a

85
“brown” world into the sometimes dangerous “white corporate” world. The next shot
shows Raymond waiting in the lobby of a corporate office. As Shady and Mr. Warner
(her boss) emerge from a meeting, the audience can overhear the remnants of a
conversation about sexuality. Mr. Warner says, “…some are intersexual, some are
homosexual, and some just don’t know what they are!” As Shady laughs at his summary
of sexualities, the office secretary interrupts the conversation by asking Raymond,
“Didn’t you say you were waiting for her?” Shady introduces Raymond to Mr. Warner,
and then Raymond immediately suspects her of liking him. After which, he asks her out
for the night and she agrees. That night, Raymond proposes to Shady.
This first critical moment in this set of scenes that leads to the break up and
eventual marriage between Shady and Raymond positions both the Chicano gang life and
lowriding as antithetical to privileged heteronormative relations in the film. When Chuco
is displaced from the front seat of the car by Shady, his look of disappointment and
disdain imply that Shady is challenging the literal carnalismo represented by Chuco and
Raymond as brothers, and the figurative carnalismo of Chicano gang membership
25
.
Then, when Shady walks away from Raymond’s car hopping competition and, after being
stopped by Raymond on the boulevard, she tells him, “Why don’t you get outta my
way?!” and also rhetorically asks, “Why don’t you go play with your boyfriends?!”,
Raymond simply replies, “Hey!”. In short, he does not offer a serious response to her
questions. Shortly after, their fight is interrupted by the news that Chuco and the vatos
from VGV are in a fight with their rivals from 11
th
Street. Taken together, not only does
the relationship between Shady and Raymond position his redemption, success, and
assimilation as integral to reinforcing heteronormativity, Shady makes the audience

86
explicitly conscious of the sexual and gendered politics of Chicano/Latino gangs and car
clubs (i.e. she queers homeboy sexual politics and aesthetics
26
). The meta-message of the
film, as a result, is that homosocial and homosexual Chicano/Latino relationships are as
equally threatening to American society as the violence that gang membership implies in
the film.
Moreover, when Raymond goes to Shady’s house to pick her up after their
engagement is presumably made public, the audience is allowed the first glimpse of a
“whole” nuclear Chicano family: the Landeros family. As Raymond enters the Landeros
home, the family is all sitting down to eat at the kitchen table while Mrs. Landeros serves
each family member from the stove. As Mrs. Landeros greets Raymond, she immediately
begins to tell him of her plans to organize his boda (wedding). She tells him, “I’m gonna
make you the most beautiful boda with bridesmaids and flowers….” Then, Mr. Landeros
immediately rises from the kitchen table and interrupts her. “Oh, don’t bother him with
flowers. What does a man care about flowers?” Then, he tells Raymond, “So you two
finally decided, huh?” To which Raymond replies, “Yes, sir. I guess so.” Then, Mr.
Landeros responds, “Good. It’s about time. And, you two start a family, huh?” but he
means the latter part to be read as an imperative statement rather than as a question. In
addition, after the actual wedding, Mrs. Landeros hugs Raymond and says, “Ramón,
welcome to the family! Have a lot of children, eh.” In these particular scenes, the
Landeros parents almost demand and actively encourage the most arcane and simplistic
proof (children) of heterosexuality from Raymond.
Thus, the film could not be more clear in attempting to reinforce and reproduce
the heteronormativity that stands in direct contrast to the homosocial and, dare the we

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imagine, homosexual relationships implied by Chicano/Latino gang membership and
lowriding. By contrast, then, this “answer” to escaping the barrio is juxtaposed against
the “nihilistic” endeavors of Chuco and his participation in—at least in this movie—anti-
capitalist and homosocial relationships. These representations, therefore, not only
reinforce heteronormativity but they also reinscribe a white dominant world view in a
film about Chicanos; this worldview functions, furthermore, to position Chicano
masculine relationships as the opposite of a hegemonic white masculinity as represented
by having children, participating in a corporate social world, and maintaining a marriage.
By default, both Chuco and Raymond, as failed marginal subjects on screen,
symbolically operate to maintain white patriarchal structures of oppression
27
--this is
clearly the underlying narrative represented by Shady’s boss, Mr. Warner.
“What am I gonna do with you, Chuco?”: Happily, Never. After.
Therefore, in spite of the promise of the marriage to successfully deliver
Raymond from the barrio, poverty, and the world of lowriding, the “marriage cure
28
”
does not work. In fact, during the wedding reception, held at the Avila house, the vatos
from 11
th
street decide to enact some revenge on Chuco and, by doing so, specifically
undermine the “progress” of the “marriage cure.” In this scene, consider the beginning of
the denouement of the film, the 11
th
street gang members come to Chuco’s house and
shoot into his living room in an attempt to kill him. Instead, they kill Chuco’s mother,
Mrs. Avila, and her death brings in to focus several of the themes I have alluded to thus
far such as the centrality of the heteronormative symbolic order of the nuclear family, the
challenges it poses to the homosocialty/sexuality of Chicano/Latino gangs, and, finally,
the issue of gender in the film. However, I should be clear: It is Chuco’s presence at the

88
wedding reception that brings about his mother’s death, the dissolution of Raymond’s
marriage, and, ultimately, pulls Raymond back in to the gang life.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Avila’s death still signifies important gendered power relations
according to the film’s narrative. Because Chuco is the cause of her death, the film text
implies that the destruction of the nuclear family—even one that is already “broken”—is
guaranteed by the homosocial familial relationships offered by gang membership. In
other words, the carnalismo that structures Chicano/Latino gang membership literally
and symbolically eliminates parental figures. In this case, Mrs. Avila’s death literally
represents the symbolic order of Chicano/Latino gangs. Chicano/Latino gang
membership also represents a nihilistic threat akin to what Lee Edelman argues is the
symbolic threat of homosexuality—the understanding that homosexuality [and the
homosociality of gang membership] leads to an inability to produce children and,
therefore, signals the end of the human race. This threat is the ideological and political
antithesis of this film’s deployment of what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism
29
” but
it also relegates women in the film to peripheral figures who only have meaning as
conduits to male relationships.
In another salient scene in the film, Chuco and his clica pay a visit to a rival gang
member’s house. In this scene, Chuco walks up to the house and knocks on the door
while the other members of his gang lay in wait to shoot the rival gang member as he
emerges from the house. Instead, the rival gang member’s little sister, Rosa, emerges
from the house. Chuco proceeds to ask for her brother. When she says he’s not there,
Chuco asks her to deliver a message to him in exchange for twenty-five cents. She
acquiesces and he takes a marker from his pocket and writes “VGV” on her hand. Then,

89
he tells Rosa that when her brother gets home, she should lift up her closed hand, open it
to show the VGV on it, and tell him, “They said, ‘Hi’.” Rosa, the pre-pubescent Chicana,
much like Mrs. Avila, represents the ways in which the film’s underlying ideological
premise continues to suggest that women in the Chicano/Latino community are conduits
of male power and male social relations. In the context of Edelman’s reproductive
futurism, the heteronormativity in this film is reinforced both by the death of Mrs. Avila
and the subsequent annihilation of the Chicano nuclear family vis a vis its substitution by
Chicano/Latino gang relations. This heteronormativity is also reinforced by contrast
through the use of Rosa as a conduit for messages between Chicano gang members.
Because she is a prepubescent girl and, therefore, presumably cannot have children, she
symbolizes the way women fit into the Chicano/Latino gang worldview. Additionally, the
act of writing VGV on her hand also enacts the symbolic and, at times, real politics of
gender in heteropatriarchal societies (i.e. inscribing the gang moniker VGV mimics a
colonial cartography related to imperialism and the subjugation of women of color by
men).
Boulevard Nights, as its producers intimated in 1979, is a cautionary tale. Georgia
Jeffries writes, “The makers of Boulevard Nights see the film as essentially antiviolence
and antigang” (60). However, in producing a film that warns against gang membership
and against violence in the broader context of a cautionary tale, and setting it in a barrio
like East Los Angeles, without any regard to the social, political, and economic
conditions that give rise to gangs in the first place, also produces ample opportunity for
inflecting the film with the prevailing racist, sexist, and heteropatriarchal logics that creep
into this film. In the end, Chuco dies avenging the death of his mother and we are left

90
with the lasting image of Raymond and Shady, left alone in the yard of the Avila house,
contemplating a new future. Nonetheless, the cautionary tale suggests that this new future
for Raymond is only possible if he abandons his familial ties, the carnalismo embodied
by his relationship with Chuco, and if he continues to dream about his entrepreneurial
endeavors.
American Me: In prison, they are the law. On the Streets, they are the power.
30

Figure 2. Universal Pictures. American Me Advertisement (1992)
American Me was originally written by Floyd Mutrux in the 1970s and, subsequently, re-
written and adapted by Desmond Nakano (who also wrote Boulevard Nights) and Edward
James Olmos. American Me, as I have noted above, was originally planned for
production in 1978 when Mutrux was shopping the script around to the different
production companies. It was supposed to emerge as part of a set of films including Walk

91
Proud, Boulevard Nights, and the Warriors during the year that Gregg Kilday of the Los
Angeles Times called the “year of the gang film.” However, after a lot of negative
publicity surrounding Walk Proud and Boulevard Nights, American Me was not made
(Solorzano, 1989). Then, in the 1980s, riding the success of an Academy Award
nomination for the film Stand and Deliver (1988), Edward James Olmos bought the
rights to the script from Mutrux and decided to rewrite, direct, and produce the film (see
figure 2 above).
When the film debuted in 1992, like the other Chicano gang films before it, it
carried with it much of the real life drama is sought to portray on screen and some drama
it did not anticipate. Perhaps the first indication of trouble came when Floyd Mutrux, the
original screenplay writer, disagreed with many of the changes that Olmos made to the
script. Jesse Katz of the Los Angeles Times reported:
Olmos rewrote large sections of Mutrux's script and transformed the lead
role of Santana, which he played, into a vicious antihero. In what was also
his directorial debut, Olmos stocked the movie full of stomach-churning
acts, including a virtual compendium of violent deaths. Those who crossed
the EME [in the film] were stabbed with a tattoo needle, shot in the
genitals, torched with gasoline, strangled with rope and sodomized with a
large, serrated dagger.
Mutrux, upset over the changes Olmos had made, never set foot on the
movie set. “I gave up one of my best pieces of work to someone who
disrespected it,” said Mutrux, 51, who is credited as one of the film's

92
executive producers. “Eddie missed the heart, the dignity, the passion—he
missed the movie. He just didn't get it” (1993).
According to Mutrux, the film was supposed to be the Latino version of The Godfather
(1972) but Olmos changed the “heart” of the film. Olmos, in response to criticism of the
film said that his version of the film was supposed to “show that there’s a cancer in this
subculture of gangs” (Katz 1993).
American Me (1992) is the fictional film adaptation loosely based on the life of
Rudolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena—a Mexican Mafia member who was killed in the
California Institute for Men’s Prison in Chino, CA in 1972 after attempting to negotiate a
peace treaty between the Mexican Mafia and the northern California-based prison gang,
Nuestra Familia. In this film, the narrative unfolds as we watch Santana, the character
based on “Cheyenne,” emerge from the streets of East Los Angeles as a gang member
and, in the process of going to prison for murder, become a ruthless founder and leader of
the Mexican Mafia. The film, in the process, tells the story of the development of the
Mexican Mafia in the 1950s at Deuel Vocational Institute for Men in Tracy, CA. Through
a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, Olmos attempts to contextualize Chicano gang
life in the aftermath of the Zoot Suit Riots and through Santana’s personal struggle to
reintegrate into society after his parole from prison. The film, as a result, becomes one of
the realest representations of gang life in prison and on the streets of East Los Angeles.
Creative License & Gang Problems for Olmos
Nevertheless, the issues that emerged during and after the film’s production are
related more to Olmos’ creative license with the story than with the predominantly realist
representation of Chicano gang life in the film. Specifically, while the film received some

93
criticism of the depiction of Chicano gang life as “cancerous” and as a result of “‘how a
dysfunctional family can ruin a youngster’s life,’” (Fregoso 124), the majority of the
issues
31
that garnered the most publicity were related to the sexual politics of the film.
Jesse Katz, in his Los Angeles Times article about the issues surrounding the film writes:
The most offensive scenes, according to sources, were those that took
liberty with the storied legacy of Cheyenne Cadena, the Mexican Mafia
icon whose life is mirrored in the fictional Santana.
Early in the film, a young Santana is sodomized by another youth in
juvenile hall, a violation that never occurred, at least not in EME folklore.
Although homosexual rape is a fact of prison life, a crucial distinction is
made between the aggressor and the victim.
Katz, in his report on a meeting in 1993 between a former Mexican Mafioso named
Ramon “Mundo” Mendoza and Edward James Olmos, quotes Mendoza as saying:
“He [Olmos] could have picked anybody else [to portray being raped in
jail], but Cheyenne, that was a real no-no,” said…the ex-Mafioso, who left
the gang in the late 1970s after embracing Christianity. “If it had ever
happened, he never would have become a Mexican Mafia member. And if
he had become a Mexican Mafia member and they learned about it later,
they would have killed him.”
Katz also points to another scene related to “sexual ambiguity” in which Santana attempts
to make love to Julie, his girlfriend in the film who is played by Evelina Fernandez. In it,
Katz notes that the only way Santana can derive personal pleasure from this encounter is

94
to attempt anal sex and reproduce the dynamics of a prison rape (including Santana’s own
rape in the film).
While Katz and others suggest that the issues related to the threats Olmos
received over the film, the lawsuit by the alleged Eme godfather at the time, and the
attempted extortion of Olmos, may or may not have had anything to do with the sexual
politics of the film, most journalists agree that it is this representation of Santana and, by
extension, Rudolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena, that created these issues. More importantly, for
the Chicano community, who is the intended audience for the film (Fregoso), the
resistance, criticism, and ambivalence related to the film (i.e. their issues) center on the
relationship between its sexual politics and the construction/formation of Chicano
nationalist identity. Specifically, the way the film plays on the mythological role of rape
in the national/ist conscious of the Chicana/o community—this is what Fregoso points to
as the ‘aesthetics of reception’ (128). In fact, Frederick Luis Aldama argues in
“Penalizing Chicano/a Bodies in Edward J. Olmos’s American Me,” that the film’s
“[v]iolence and rapes invoke a larger history of colonization and conquest.” He adds that
the “rape of Esperanza, [Santana’s mother in the movie], marks Santana as a proverbial
hijo de la chingada” (Aldama, 80) and, in this way, Santana literally and symbolically
originates from a history of colonial violence (since it is ultimately unclear who his
biological father is). Moreover, there is another scene that compounds the rape of his
mother where the man who raised Santana is de-zooted when his ducktail is cut off. This
scene, as analyzed by Luz Calvo in her 2002 article “Lemme Stay, I Want to Watch:
Ambivalence in Borderlands Cinema,” is incredibly significant in understanding the
sexual politics of the film because she contends that this act of de-zooting is “a symbolic

95
castration of the Chicano” (75). These scenes together underscore a primary pillar of
colonialism—sexual violence. Calvo also articulates how the rape of Santana’s mother
and the de-zooting of the man who raised him work to fragment Santana’s own identity,
which is best shown in a scene where he pens a letter to a love interest from prison
saying, “I am two people. One was born the day I met you, the other was born in a
downtown tattoo parlor [the place where his mother was raped].” As Calvo suggests,
“Santana’s identity is (de)formed from the remnants of the history of colonial sexual
violence in the southwestern United States…” (75). Thus, the context of conquest,
colonialism, race, representation and State power all come in to play here. Ultimately,
what is at stake for the Chicano community is a reminder that this “community” was
formed through sexual violence, imperial relations, and the construction of race as a
terministic screen through which to institutionalize such power relations; what is at stake
for the Mexican Mafia is that such representations have repercussions in the prison yards
of California where rape signifies differently and where it has the potential to cause more
violence.
eMeXicano Nationalism
Yet, while such analyses can be dismissed by suggesting that the Mexican
Mafia—the “Eme” as it is commonly referred to—simply would not tolerate such
representations of its members being raped, it is also important to note that Rudy
“Cheyenne” Cadena subscribed to the radical politics of the Chicano movement in the
1960s and 1970s. Cadena was revered in Eme folklore for his politicized, Chicano
nationalist views. He was “steeped in the radical texts of his time” and tried to “end the
cycle of bloodshed by forging a truce with another Latino prison gang” (Katz). More

96
importantly, it was Cheyenne’s attempt, because of his political vision, to unite the Eme
and Nuestra Familia that ultimately got him killed. Members of the Northern California-
based Nuestra Familia stabbed and killed Cheyenne in prison, not Mexican Mafia
members as is portrayed in the film. These inconsistencies in the film, therefore,
ultimately create real life problems for Olmos but only insofar as they uncover the very
sensitive subject of the relationships between sexual politics, identity, nationalism, and
violence.
Uncovering these relationships through these representations in film also
necessarily lead to an engagement with the gendered politics of the film as they relate to
violence and Chicano nationalism. Again, Rosa Linda Fregoso accurately notes that
while Olmos claims that Julie is the ‘only hero of the film,’ [s]omething about this
flickering lantern we are expected to hold up at the end of the tunnel, about this burden
bequeathed by Olmos to all Chicanas, makes [her] suspicious.” She adds that “Chicanas
in American Me carry more than their share of the responsibility for a man: first as
origins of Santana’s deviance, and second as vehicles for his salvation” (133). And, she is
right. Much like in Boulevard Nights, women in the world of Chicano gangs are only
conduits for male power, the reason for male “deviance” or their failures, and, for their
salvation. Nonetheless, while Fregoso astutely points to the role of women in American
Me and, by extension, most Chicano/Latino gang films, she seems to quickly gloss over
her own analytical foundations for these roles. Namely, her historical analogy to the
figure of “La Malinche” as an archetype for the women in American Me deserves a fuller
analytical treatment.

97
In her analysis, Fregoso points to the rape scenes that toggle between Santana’s
sexual encounter with Julie (and her rape) and the vicious rape of an Italian mobster’s son
in prison. Cinematically, the film moves between the two scenes in an attempt to suggest
that Santana’s expression of sexuality and power are so intimately locked up together that
the only way he can climax is reproducing the process of rape in prison. Fregoso writes,
“The effects of this ‘original sin’ [the rape of Malinche], the violation of a passive
woman’s sexuality, continue to inform the internal logic of the film’s narrative: rape,
violations of masculine sexuality, serves as the primary mechanism for shocking
retaliations on the part of Chicano males” (132). However, in her treatment of these
scenes and the historical analogue to which it points, Fregoso does not fully consider how
this analogy elides the difference between sexual violence perpetuated by Spanish
conquerors and the reproduction of sexual violence by their “offspring”—arguably
secondary victims of such sexual violence. In this respect, as she argues for
contextualizing the realistic violence in the film and Chicano gang membership as a
product of “poverty and unemployment in barrios,” the sexual and gender politics of the
film must also be contextualized in relation to the imperial/colonial history that she
invokes. In short, the film’s “internal logic” reproduces the gender and sexual politics of
Spanish and, for Chicanos, American imperialism but attempts to portray such politics as
part of the psychopathology of Chicano gang members.
In the end, American Me much like Boulevard Nights functions as another
cautionary tale. According to Olmos, he made the film to steer young kids away from
gangs. Moreover, like Boulevard Nights, it is an attempt at a realistic representation of
Chicano gang life in East Los Angeles and in the California prison system. However,

98
American Me represents Chicano gang life in such a realistic way that it unearths much
more of the social, political, sexual relations among and between Chicanos in the United
States. The elements in the film evoke the “genuine realism that explains why a relative
of a pinto would recognize ‘in those movements, those looks,’ those gestures, and ‘those
silences,’ [performed by Olmos]… ‘an experience previously unseen in film’” (Fregoso
131). It is this “genuine realism” that also reproduces the recognition of the long legacy
of violence—especially sexual violence--, racism, and “capitalism’s inhumane disdain for
the poor and disempowered” (Fregoso 132) in the Chicano community; and, this realism
Figure 3. 5 Stick Films. La Mission Film Advertisement (2009)
simultaneously evokes the violent and visceral reactions that have followed this film
precisely because we recognize, beneath the surface of the narrative, those legacies of
colonialism, capitalism, racism, and sexism—all of which are very real issues in our

99
community—and, all of which work together to establish the ambivalent feelings of fear,
desire, fascination and anxiety that theorists such as Fregoso and Calvo articulate in
relationship to these films.
La Mission: …from the thorn emerges the flower.
La Mission (2009) is a film written and directed by Peter Bratt that focuses on the
complex relationship between Che Rivera—a recovering alcoholic, ex-gang member, and
former convict—and his son “Jes”—a promising young Chicano high school student—in
San Francisco’s Mission District. After Che, played by Benjamin Bratt (see figure 3
above), discovers that his son is gay, the crux of the film shifts its focus away the
narrative per se and on to Che as a “hypermasculine” Chicano, who must re-negotiate his
relationship with his son. La Mission, therefore, is not a traditional gang film like
Boulevard Nights and American Me; it does, however, play on their cinematic and
literary discourses and historic representations of Chicano gang members, their
masculinity, sexuality, and their nationalism. The opening shots of Che walking down the
streets of “the Mission,” for example, clearly establish the community and Che as
expressly Chicano nationalist and hypermasculine. In the first shot of Che, he is walking
down Mission Street and his scene is interrupted by other shots of the different murals of
the Mission, and Aztec dancers who are performing on the street. In one particular shot, a
close up of a mural focuses on a young Chicana, playing a caracol or conch shell. In this
mural image, she holds the caracol with hands that bear the remnants of broken chains.
The next few scenes show Che at work as a bus driver. And, in an interaction that
is supposed to reinforce his own hypermasculinity, he confronts two young Latinos in the
back of the bus who are playing loud music on a boom box. Initially, Che politely asks

100
the teenagers to turn off the music. “Hey, no radio” he says. “Read the sign.” The young
men refuse to turn the radio off and, as a challenge to Che, turn the volume higher. Then,
as Che goes to the back of the bus to physically confront them, one of the young men
immediately turns off the radio. He explains to the other young man, “I know dude.
That’s Jes Rivera’s dad, man. Muthafucka’s straight up O.G. [Original Gangster] too.
Like serious.” To which, his friend replies, “So what?!” As Che reaches the back of the
bus, he and the defiant youngster get into a stare down and Che tells him, “Time to get
off the bus, little homie.” The defiant youngster asks, in a tone that registers as a
challenge more than a question, “And, if I don’t?!” Che replies with a question of his own
and asks, “That ain’t really an option, is it?” Sensing that they have met their match and
more, both youngsters exit the bus.
This cinematic introduction to Che Rivera that follows him from the streets of the
Mission to his work and back to his home conveys an ethos about Che that
metaphorically “begins in the streets,” is reinforced by interactions like those between
him and the young Latino gang members on the bus, and, finally, by his interactions with
an elderly neighbor to whom he delivers groceries. Che Rivera
32
embodies a Chicano
masculinity and nationalism that has progressed and changed; and, it is one that is still in
progress but one that is radically different than the Chicano gang figures we encounter is
Boulevard Nights and especially American Me. Nonetheless, Che Rivera is still an
“O.G.”-ex-convict-lowriding-Chicano and he must, in this film, directly confront what is
only a very powerful subtext in the other two films I have discussed: a queer Chicano
identity.

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“Low and Slow” Progress
“Low and slow” is one of Che Rivera’s mantras in the film and seems to
accurately describe the progress that he has made over characters like Chuco and
Santana. However, keeping “low” seems to have a double valance at the onset of this
film. Our introduction to Jes, Che’s son in the film, comes at the expense of his “keeping
a low profile.” The filmmakers intentionally play on many racial stereotypes and racist
narratives in the film when introducing Jes. While the audience is initially introduced to
him through a conversation between Che and his brother Rene in which Che tells Rene
that Jes made the honor roll again, the visual and cinematic introduction to him presents
Jes as a stereotypical Chicano urban teenager—and one that seems headed for trouble.
In the first scene that involves Jes, who is played by Jeremy Ray Valdez, he walks
out of Mission High School and meets some classmates who have cruised up in a car to
meet him in front of the school. Jes, dressed in oversized pants, an oversized shirt with an
Aztec calendar on it, and an oversized jacket holding it all together characterizes what
Richard T. Rodriguez has called the “homeboy aesthetic
33
.” Jes greets his “homeboys” in
the car right outside the school and they invite him to go check out “the cute girl who
works at McDonald’s.” He refuses to go and tells his friends that he has to study.
In the very next scene, Jes is suspiciously creeping around a very nice house in
the hills of San Francisco. He puts his hoodie over his head, jumps over a small wall, and
enters the back yard of the house. He enters the house through a back door and,
immediately, the camera shows a close up of some money and a gun on a dresser. The
soundtrack changes at this moment and we hear a syncopated, rushed, melody—it is a

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score that is supposed to evoke suspense in the audience. Then, Jes grabs the gun and
confronts the young white teenager who emerges from the bathroom in a towel.
Jes: (Wielding the gun) “Do you got my shit white boy?!
Jordan: I said I would have it next week. (Clearly afraid and slowly
walking backwards).
Jes: (Angry) I told you next week ain’t good enough.
Jordan: (Nervous) Is there some way we can…I don’t know…renegotiate?
Jes: (Almost pinning Jordan up against the wall) Nah. It’s too late for that.
Your ass is mine.
Jordan: I think I like the sound of that! (Both Jes and Jordan smile at each
other and kiss).
The dramatic turn in this scene and the overall introduction to Jes operates, as I have
suggested above, on assumptions about Jes as a young Chicano and what such an identity
entails. The Chicano nationalist identity that both Che and, by “blood,” that Jes inherits,
posits that queerness and Chicano nationalism are incongruent and mutually exclusive
identities. The dramatic turn in the narrative also works because it is premised on racial,
gender, and class-based stereotypes about young Chicano men. Nonetheless, it also
reveals, as is evident with the representations of the homosociality/sexuality of Chicano
gangs, a subtext, tone, and element of danger.
In this particular case, however, the context of gang membership and Chicano
nationalism become part of the mise-en-scene of the explicit discourse of
queerness/sexuality represented by Jes. Although when Che, finds pictures of Jes and
Jordan making out at a club, he confronts Jes about his sexuality, and the sexual politics

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of Chicano gang members (especially pintos), Chicano nationalism, and homosexuality
take center stage. The dialogue of this scene is especially revealing. After showing Jes the
pictures, Che says: Now tell me. Who’s the fuckin’ white boy [With emphasis]?” and the
following dialogue ensues:
Jes: He’s a friend.
Che: What kind of friend?
Jes: A friend.
Che: Is that why he’s man-handling you like you’re some kind of Mexican
bitch?!
Jes: Fuck you, man. [Che smacks Jes across the face]
Che: You wanna start cussing at me? Huh? You try me again?
Jes: You’re so fucking predictable, you know that?
Che: Yeah? [Che smacks Jes again] Then, I guess you saw that coming,
right?
Jes: You don’t know shit, man!
Che: ?Otra vez? [Che smacks Jes again] No? Good. Now it’s my turn.
Why does this motherfucker have his tongue down your throat? [Shows
the picture to Jes]
Jes: Why do you think?
Che: Answer me! [Screaming]
Jes: ‘Cause I’m a fucking faggot! That’s why! ‘Cause I'm your fucking
faggot son!
Che: [Raises his hand…motioning that he wants to choke Jes] I want you
out of my house. Now. You make me sick to my fucking stomach.
Jes: What about you, huh? Did being locked up make you sick to your
stomach too?
Che: What did you say? [Surpised]

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Jes: Come on, pop? You gonna tell me you didn’t, you know, at least try
to cop a little prison ass just once? (La Mission 2009)
A physical fight follows this verbal confrontation between Che and Jes and ends out in
the street. Che publicly outs Jes and, then, disowns him. The most salient portions of this
dialogue focus on the order and content of the questions Che asks. They reveal, as I have
suggested above, a privileging of markers of identity such as that “defined” by the
parameters of old line Chicanismo. This is why the first serious question Che asks in this
scene is “Who’s the fuckin’ white boy [in the picture he shows Jes]? While one can argue
that Che asks about Jordan because of the manifestation of homosexuality in the picture
[Jes and Jordan are kissing in the picture]. The question itself seems to reveal an equal or
greater concern with Jordan’s whiteness. Thus, Che opposition to Jes’s homosexuality is
position that carries with it as much opposition to whiteness as an opposition to
homosexuality. Furthermore, this is an inverse of the old Chicano nationalist opposition
to Chicana feminism but especially Chicana lesbian feminist. The implication is that the
politics of gender and sexuality challenged the privileged position and politics of Chicano
nationalism. For Che, then, his son’s homosexuality seems to be the greatest threat to his
and Jes’s Chicano identity because the subtext is that homosexuality is part of a
privileged, upper class “white” identity in San Francisco.
Another element of this conflict and tension between Chicano nationalism and
queerness emerges through the articulation of another of Che's mantras. He continually
tells his friends and his son to “Stay Brown.” Importantly, Che often tells Jes (prior to
finding out about his son's sexuality) to "Stay Brown" as he leaves the house each day.
This quotidian reminder to his son works to uphold a Chicano nationalist racial formation
that reproduces or attempts to enforce heteronormativity. What I mean to suggest is that

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in order to “Stay Brown,” Jes would need to disavow his queer identity and embrace a
heterosexual, hyper-masculine, identity that would mirror that portrayed by his father and
understood as Chicano.
Ultimately, Jes does not conform to his father’s version of “Staying Brown” and,
again, Che is forced to confront the seemingly problematic relationship between his
Chicano nationalism, his masculinity, and his son’s sexuality. Nonetheless, at one point
in the film, Che seems to be negotiating his relationship with his son very well. But this
does not indicate Che’s acceptance of his son’s sexuality. Che simply, “does not want to
hear about it.” Then, after his son is shot by the young man who plays music too loud on
Che’s bus at the beginning of the film, Che seems to begin to realize that he should love
his son unconditionally. But after a confrontation in the hospital with Jordan, Jes’s
partner, Che threatens Jordan with physical violence and this hypermasculine threat,
again destroys the relationship between Che and his son.
By the film’s end, Che resorts back to drinking and he and his house go through a
physical transformation. Che and his house are deteriorating and unkempt. He is
unshaven and seems to wander the streets of the Mission again. This time, however, he
seems to wander the streets aimlessly. As he wanders the streets, he comes across an
Aztec ceremony that celebrates and mourns the life of the young man who shot his son.
With the Aztec dancing and ceremonial singing in the background, thunder roars above
and signals an epiphanic moment for Che. He goes straight home, shaves and begins to
restore the 1964 Impala he had planned to give to Jes upon graduation from high school.
The final scene in the film shows Che driving down the highway in the 1964 Impala—a
gift to his son with a message on the trunk that reads: The Best Friend I Got—toward Los

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Angeles. Presumably, Che is heading to U.C.L.A. where Jes is studying as an
undergraduate.
This film, unlike Boulevard Nights and American me, offers a least one
intervention in the exhaustive colonialist and imperialist representations of chicanismo in
popular film and culture. Because the subject and focus of the film was Che Rivera rather
than Jes Rivera, the message of the film is and was directed at the Chicanos who identify
with Che and who are represented by him—specifically, Chicano ex/gang members,
ex/convicts, lowriders, and, generally, men of color who “stay brown” and subscribe to
heteropatriarchal, masculinist logics of oppression. In fact, the film does a great job in
symbolically engaging with the discourse, images, and narratives of previous
Chicano/Latino gang films in order to “speak” directly to them. The opening scene in
which Che is walking down Mission street is reminiscent of Chuco and Raymond
walking down the boulevard in Boulevard Nights; the musical focus on “oldies” sets the
scene, the mood, and lends authenticity for much of the action involving Che; the
lowriding clearly alludes to Boulevard Nights; and, finally, the question about
rape/sexuality or as Jes puts it, “a little bit of prison ass” is a distinct allusion to American
Me and a pinto sexuality. Nevertheless, as I have noted above, La Mission is not
necessarily a gang film; it is a film about an ex-gang member and his relationship with his
gay son. To put this distinction directly, gangs and gang membership formulate the
background and undercurrent of La Mission while gangs and gang membership formulate
the foreground in Boulevard Nights and American Me. This distinction also makes it
necessary for the producers of the latter films to disavow the message of violence in their
films and distance themselves from the gangs and subjects they represent. The

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filmmakers and producers of La Mission, however, can endorse the film and laud it as a
message of tolerance and the importance of unconditional love. And, perhaps the greatest
challenge to imperialist, racist, heteronormative, and patriarchal logics of domination
embedded in these films is that we love each other unconditionally. This unconditional
love, in the 1960s social movements, translated into the slogans: “Brown is beautiful,”
“Black is beautiful,” and, “All power to the people!” Thus, for people of color and
especially men of color in the United States, the greatest revolutionary act becomes
loving and caring for oneself.

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CHAPTER THREE
Soundtracking La Vida Loca: Chicano/Latino Gangs, Music, & Affective Possibility

“Both rhythm and el barrio are complexes of space, motion, and destination. As human expressions, they
arrive somewhere; otherwise, they haven’t fulfilled their purpose. In nature of their experience, however,
they are infinite.”

--Steven Loza, Barrio Rhythm (1993).

In Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, Josh Kun (2005) analyzes the
relationship between music and the formation of “American
34
” identity. Beginning with
Walt Whitman’s poetic determination of a singularly “American” (i.e. U.S.-based) voice
in “I Hear America Singing” (1860) and ending with a consideration of Ozomatli’s
reconfiguration of Egyptian Lover’s question, “What is a DJ if he can’t scratch?” into the
question: “What is a DJ if he can’t scratch to a ranchera?” (220), Kun argues, “political
and cultural citizenship is configured through the performance of popular music and its
reception, via acts of listening, by the people” (30). He adds that because national and
cultural citizenship is understood to have an “acoustic, aural dimension that sonically
interpolates [people] into the body of the nation” (30), “listening has become a method
for enacting Americanness, a mode of cultural citizenship” (36) that is regulated in order
to produce acts of selective/nationalist listening practices. Such listening practices, argues
Kun, effect a silencing of minoritized voices and their music in efforts to solidify and
homogenize a national body whose underlying ideology is white supremacy.
Nonetheless, he also argues that many different, syncopated responses to such listening
practices, through the voices of Frederick Douglass, the corridos of Northern Mexico, the

109
poetry of Langston Hughes and Julian Bond (35-38), etc., formulate an alternative space
that allows for “critical” rather than nationalist listening practices. Kun points to these
critical listening practices because, he argues, they allow listeners to re-map the cultural,
ideological, and political terrain of “America” from an understanding of the United States
and “whiteness” as the center of musical production to an understanding of music in the
United States that is more inclusive and transnational. Thus, he suggests that critical
listening practices lead to the development of liberatory, transnational spaces in music
and American society that he calls “audiotopias
35
.”
In the particular context of the Los Angeles music scene since the 1940s, Josh
Kun, Steven Loza, Ruben Molina, George Lipsitz, and other music scholars point to the
numerous connections between the African American and Chicano communities in the
development of Rhythm and Blues, West Coast Jazz, and hip hop music. They argue that
WWII, the social changes that resulted from economic opportunities created by the war,
and the development of new technologies, provided the conditions that allowed for a
multiethnic, transnational formation of music in Los Angeles. Loza, in his seminal work
on Mexican American music in Los Angeles, argues that the post-World War II period
carried with it “great expectations” for the Mexican-American generation in the 1950s
and highlights the increased wealth and social mobility of Latinos and other ethnic
minorities as a result of their participation in WWII. He points to the increased business
and other economic networks, and the development of new technologies like televisions
as contributors to such mobility. He also suggests that these new technologies “deeply
affected international diplomacy and communication” and notes, “The number of

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television sets in the country increased from 7 million in 1946 to 50 million in 1960”
(Loza 41).
Nonetheless, Loza adds that the early music of Mexican and Latino barrios in Los
Angeles was dominated by musical groups and performers from greater Latin America
until the 1950s. Loza scoured through entertainment reports and headlines in La
Opinion—the United States’ longest and oldest Spanish-language newspaper—and
concludes that different Mexican and Latino artists dominated a few select venues like
the Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles. Artists like Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán,
Las Hermanas Padilla, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, and the incredibly popular Trio Los
Panchos flooded the downtown and eastside Mexican and Latino musical scene. Then,
slowly, Loza argues, radio and television allowed for a linguistic bridge that reflected a
growing Mexican-American population. He writes, “Don Ramón Cruz hosted a bilingual
program of Latin American music Monday through Friday evenings on KXLA in
Pasadena” (61), offers up movies like Sombrero (1953) that starred Ricardo Montalbán,
and bilingual television programs Fandango that premiered on a local CBS television
station, as evidence of such changes. Ultimately, Loza argues that the emergence of Lalo
Guerrero onto the music scene in Los Angeles is the turning point from a predominantly
Mexican and Latino-dominated music scene to an expressly Chicano music scene.
Ruben Molina, a self-published, independent historian of Chicano “soul” music
makes the connections between Lalo Guerrero, his adaptation of the dominant Mexican
(Ranchera and Boléro) styles of music, and the predominantly African American style of
rhythm and blues. Molina writes, “From the beginning of the rhythm and blues years[,]
Chicano musicians incorporated the hard rockin’ beat of jump blues into the danzónes,

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guarachas, and rumbas that they were performing. As early as 1946[,] Lalo Guerrero was
recording rancheras with the lyrics sung in caló (a mix of English, Spanish and an urban
Figure 4. Don Tosti. Americansabor.org; Don Tosti Papers; CEMA 88; 14 Sept. 2012 Web.
dialect brought to Mexico via Spain
36
that is neither).” Molina adds, “It was the slang
vernacular of the pachuco and by 1948 he introduced the boogie woogie style of Lionel
Hampton, Louis Jordan, Roy Milton and other black swing combo’s into his music” (8).
Molina also highlights the role in developing a Chicano sound that Edmundo “Don Tostí”
Tostado and his band the Pachuco Boogie Boys played in turning to the African
American Jazz scene on Central Avenue in Los Angeles for its influence. Molina writes:
Don Tostí’s 1948 recording of Pachuco Boogie was an accumulation of
all the internal and external forces that created the Mexican American
subculture of the pachuco. The recording, which sold over one-million
records, was a statement saying to America that five years after the ‘Zoot
Suit Riots’ the pachuco was still here and they were not going to hide their
pride (8).

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He argues that the emergence of Chicano music as a cultural expression was also a result
of a “clash between traditional Mexican culture and the newly emerging Chicano culture”
(9) and clashes between the white power structure of the United States that was enforced
by the military and the Los Angeles police during the Zoot Suit Riots.
In other words, the emergence of Chicano music in the 1940s and 1950s reflected
not only a cultural shift away from strictly Mexican and Latino music that was written
and performed in Spanish but it also reflected a political shift among a generation of
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the southwest. Loza, in explaining the political
context in which Chicano music emerges in Los Angeles, draws an important analogy to
Black social movements and their terms. He writes, “The Los Angeles Chicano
movement reflected the general spirit of young people who rejected the term Mexican
American in favor of Chicano, a word that symbolized defiance of the notions of cultural
assimilation and represented an expression of pride, even though it was a derogatory
word in many sectors, much like the word black, adopted by African Americans” (Loza
47). Elucidating the analogy that Loza makes in his book, George Lipsitz contextualizes
the African American rhythm and blues tradition as part of a positive, militant response
to terrible social and economic conditions in the black community. He writes:
The early postwar period…seemed to mark a turning point for race
relations in the United States as well. For many African
Americans, Charlie Parker’s 1945 song ‘Now’s the Time’
announced the dawn of a new era. Militant civil rights activity
among returning war veterans and the Black anti-draft movement
organized by A. Philip Randolph seemed to complement the

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extraordinarily intense cultural creativity manifest in the
emergence of writers, including Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and
Ann Petry” (xxv-xxvi).
The implication is, at the very least, that these respective communities often borrowed
from one another, and thus the political contexts for both the Chicano and African
American empowerment movements translate into the contexts for the emergence of
Chicano and African American rhythm and blues traditions in Los Angeles. As such,
Loza and Lipsitz point to the important political elements that undergird rhythm and
blues music in Los Angeles as the elements that allow for the “contact zones” that exist
between African Americans and Chicanos in this musical genre.
Finally, using the music group Ozomatli’s song “La Misma Canción” as a text to
articulate Los Angeles-based music as transnational, and to illustrate how music
continues to be a product of this “cultural compression” between African Americans and
Chicanos in Los Angeles, Josh Kun writes: “The song unravels Los Angeles as a vital
space of exchange and coalition between black and Mexican communities, between
populations engaged in the same war against legislative power, white supremacy, and
urban renewal—populations that very same power would like to see separated, divided,
and, more importantly, at war with each other” (220). This new Chicano musical form,
adds Ruben Molina, also “signified a cultural break with both Mexico and America and
morphed into a hybrid of both” (9). Chicano music, as a result, made its way onto the
musical stage in the United States by situating itself between traditional Mexican and
Latin American musical genres, and African American rhythm and blues. Moreover, Kun

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argues that this social and political location of Chicano music —as part of what he calls
the “audiospatiality” (22) of music—forms its “postnationalism.”
While I agree that Chicano music, as a cultural expression, situated in the social,
political, and economic moments that framed its development from the 1940s through the
end of the late 20
th
century, carries with it postnational and transcultural elements that
include the influences of Mexican musicians like Jorge Negrete and African American
musicians like Gerald Wilson, Chicano music nonetheless emerges from localized social,
political, and economic context and emphasizing its postnational elements blurs the
importance of such contexts. Steven Loza situates his own analysis of Chicano music in
Los Angeles in the particular sociopolitical and economic conditions facing
Chicanos/Latinos in East Los Angeles precisely because those local conditions
significantly inform this musical development. He writes, “[T]housands of people faced
eviction in the East Los Angeles housing projects because of depressed economic
conditions. Delinquency was a problem, and merchants complained about inadequate law
enforcement.” Loza also notes, “Gangs had begun not only to develop but also to
proliferate as conflict among different barrios intensified” (42). Then, he points out that
low rider car clubs also developed as part of a local business and law enforcement effort
to “convert gangs into [these] clubs. This program,” he points out, “began a tradition of
car clubs among eastside youth” (42). This local social, political, and economic context,
then, intimately connects Chicano music to the development of Chicano/Latino gangs and
low riding—one of the vehicles for popularizing “oldies”/rhythm and blues music in East
Los Angeles—such that, to insist on a transnational or postnational context in relation to

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the development of Chicano music ignores the very concrete realities and the material
conditions from which it emerges.
To be clear, the insistence of situating Chicano music and, by extension, “Oldies”
or rhythm and blues
37
music in a local context, does not negate or contest the multiethnic/
multiracial elements of these musical forms. In fact, George Lipsitz points to
uncontrollable unemployment rates for African Americans, police brutality, and even an
attempt by municipal officials to destroy rhythm and blues music (Otis 1993) as part of
the shared context between Chicanos and African Americans that leads to the emergence
of rhythm and blues in East Los Angeles and its adoption by Chicanos on the eastside.
This insistence on the local context is an attempt to foreground the material conditions
(i.e. the poverty, racism, and class difference experienced by Chicanos/Latinos in Los
Angeles) in order to understand the ideological and emotional work that Oldies music
performs by symbolically “soundtracking” the lives of Chicanos/Latinos in the United
States.
More importantly, the postnational contexts that scholars like Josh Kun insist
upon, while politically and ideologically astute, often privilege a subjectivity and
postnationalism that is possible only for a select few. For example, Kun’s personal
narrative in Audiotopia (2005) reveals certain assumptions about identity formation in
relationship to music. Kun writes, “Building my record collection was my way of
building my own world, creating an alternate set of cultural spaces that, through the
private act of listening, could deliver me to different places and different times and allow
me to try out different versions of myself” (2). Then, he says, “My attachments to the
music were so strong precisely because I felt—unquestionably, unflinchingly—that the

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music was mine” (2). This personal narrative that Kun uses to formulate a premise for his
concept “audiotopia” and for popular music’s postnationalism, privileges an access to and
ownership of different types of music. Such access and ownership (both literal and
metaphorical) requires significant expendable income and cultural capital; and, it ignores
many of the structural issues related not only to real economic conditions in poor
communities of color but also in relation to space in these communities. Many young
Chicanos and African Americans do not have easy access to record stores in their
communities. And, where record stores do/did exist in poor communities of color, young
Chicano and African American men risked injury or worse traversing the different
barrios to get to them.
In addition, Kun’s “private act of listening” through which he “builds his own
world” and “creates alternate cultural spaces” also ignores the realities of space—or,
better said, the lack of space—in poor, working class families and barrios. Often,
bedrooms and other spaces of apartments and houses are shared spaces in these
communities. In other words, the privacy of one’s own room is a luxury that many poor
Chicanos and African Americans could not afford. As such, the “private act of listening”
that is the premise for Kun’s “audiotopia” is never completely private; and, more often
than not, it is always an interrupted and contested act.
Again, this is not to say that audiotopias are not possible; nor does it negate the
elements of postnationalism in popular music. It does, however, call for re-situating
Kun’s notion of “nationalist” and “critical” listening practices—private and otherwise—
in relation to the development of both individual subject identity formation and group
(i.e. racial/ethnic) identity formation in concrete social and political contexts. For

117
example, while Josh Kun poignantly argues how music creates spaces of radical
possibility through music like that of El Chicano and Ozomatli, and that such music is
part of a longstanding tradition that creates a “space of exchange and coalition between
black and Mexican communities,” (220), such coalition between black and brown
communities have not really materialized into concrete relationships on the eastside of
Los Angeles—the setting for many of the texts I treat in this project. According to the
United States Census Bureau, in 1990, Boyle Heights was 94.3% Latino—86% percent
of whom were Mexican-origin residents. The Census Bureau also reports that in 1990 the
exogamy rate was 3.5%. Thus, again, while I agree with Kun that music itself is
postnational and carries with it the possibility for creating and altering space (i.e.
audiotopias), the concrete/material “topos” that forms the eastside of Los Angeles is in
fact more homogeneous and therefore less multiethnic and transcultural than the music
that soundtracks its social and political spaces.
Furthermore, because this chapter concerns itself with the development of
Chicano music, “oldies,” and Chicano gang narratives, my focus will be on the role of
collective or group listening practices in relationship to Chicanos/Latinos in general and
Chicano/Latino gang members in particular. In this respect, my analyses of these musical
texts must necessarily be grounded in this local concrete context rather than in a more
theoretical postnational or even transnational framework. As such, in my analysis of
Michael Pressman’s Boulevard Nights (1979), Edward James Olmos’ American Me
(1992), and Peter Bratt’s La Mission (2009), I argue that the film’s soundtrack
contributes not only to the mise-en-scene but, at times, allows for a complexity of
emotional representation for Chicano/Latino gang members and simultaneously lends a

118
type of authenticity to the overall representation of these gang members. The soundtrack,
then, can be said to operate as part of the background rather than the foreground of the
films that works on the subconscious through an interplay between image and sound
intended to create what Josh Kun calls an “audiotopia.”
Nonetheless, this suggestion immediately raises questions about the role that
oldies—officially rhythm & blues and traditionally considered an African American
musical tradition—plays in the Chicano community who is arguably the intended
audience for these Latino gang films (Fregoso). Furthermore, since the Chicano/Latino
community represented in these films has both a symbolic and literal location, an analysis
of these soundtracks must consider which types of space (literal and symbolic) these
soundtracks create and point to as signifiers.
Thus, like Kun, I suggest “music is a mode of relation, a point of contact” (14)
between different communities, and groups, and, that the “world we encounter at the
level of sound and acoustic experience is a new world of social experience and emotional
possibility, but it is also, necessarily, a strange world that we negotiate through listening”
(12). My aim in this chapter is to begin to develop a theoretical approach and argument
for understanding the cultural, social, and ideological work that oldies music/R&B
performs for the Chicano community but especially as it relates to the representation of
Chicanos/Latinos in general, and Chicano/Latino gang members in particular. I
specifically argue that the soundtracks in Chicano/Latino gang films and the “oldies” or
rhythm and blues music they deploy allows for oppositional and competing meanings
with regard to Chicanos/Latinos but especially Chicano/Latino gang members—that
oldies music provides a counterdiscourse or “audio dissonance” to a dominant narrative

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about Chicano/Latino gang members represented in films that portray them as stoic,
monolithic, violent, and hypermasculine figures. This musical deployment arguably
creates an air of authenticity and acts as a substitute or complement for complex
emotional moments in representations of Chicano life. In other words, this soundtracking
in Latino gang films and Chicano/Latino cultural life allows for the transmission of
cultural codes through musical selections that provide a multidimensional representation
of Chicano and Latino gang figures and, by extension, the community. Moreover,
because this musical genre signifies in a multitude of ways for the Chicano/Latino
community in California—especially for their family members in gangs and in prisons
across the state—, it also functions as a conduit of emotions through the confines of these
prisons and what they represent (i.e. state power) via dedications on the radio, through
prison letters, and, literally, as a soundtrack that evokes the memories of loved ones in
homemade DVDs. In short, I argue that these other cultural products like prison letters
and community-created films reflect the transmission of cultural codes and an affective
complexity that disrupts one-dimensional understandings of Chicano nationalism as an
element expressed through gang membership’s “outside-the-law” ethos in the
community.
El Monte Legion Stadium, the New Eastside Chicano Sound, & Art Laboe
The social, political, and economic issues Chicanos and African Americans faced
in Los Angeles but also in the entire country gave rise to two particular music styles, and
forced an ongoing “intercultural exchange” through music between these two groups in
the city of El Monte, CA. As George Lipsitz notes in his introduction to Johnny Otis’
Upside Your Head! (1993), after the repression by city officials of jazz, rhythm and

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blues, and the venues in the city that provided space for the multiethnic crowds that came
to hear and dance to this music, Johnny Otis and other music promoters moved their
concerts to El Monte’s Legion Stadium. Lipsitz also notes, “The proximity of El Monte
to large concentrations of Mexican Americans augmented the intercultural dialogue that
had always been a part of this music.” He continues, “The Black saxophonist Chuck
Higgins became a big favorite among Mexican American young people, and he recorded
his hit record ‘Pachuko hop’ in tribute to their distinctive dress and dance styles” (Lipsitz
xxvi). Thus, while already articulating the possibility of multiracial elements of jazz and
rhythm and blues in Los Angeles through the life of Johnny Otis, Lipsitz points to the
way a racist power structure in Los Angeles ultimately made El Monte’s American
Legion Hall the literal site of multiethnic/multicultural coalition and solidarity.
Moreover, Matt Garcia in his chapter “A World of Its Own,” outlines the working
class elements of El Monte’s Legion Hall that also cut across racial and ethnic lines. He
writes:
[P]rior to the 1932 Olympics, the developers constructed this multipurpose
structure with the idea of hosting major sporting events and conventions to
accommodate the mostly working-class communities of the San Gabriel
Valley. In its early days, Legion Stadium hosted the wrestling matches for
the 1932 Olympics held in Los Angeles, and later became the sight of
roller derby matches for the Los Angeles team, the Thunderbirds….
Moreover, the auditorium maintained an open invitation to organizations
interested in using the stadium. Regardless of the event, the functions held
there inevitably reflected the blue-collar image of the people who lived

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nearby and used the hall (Garcia).
Thus, it was here, in this “blue-collar” site that the shared musical, cultural, and political
roots of rhythm and blues, and Chicano music merged and solidified, and led to the
listening practices related to “oldies” of the Chicano/Latino community in the southwest.
Of course, El Monte Legion Stadium was eventually closed by the city because it was
deemed to create a “unwholesome, unhealthy situation,” (Otis xxvii) and it was turned
into a United States Post Office. Today, a plaque remains in front of the post office
commemorating this site as integral to the history of rhythm and blues and Chicano music
in the Los Angeles area.
Nonetheless, the closure of venues like El Monte’s American Legion Stadium
meant that radio and other mediums of communication would be primarily responsible
for the proliferation of rhythm and blues, and Chicano music. In an interview with
Ramón Hernandez about his book Chicano Soul (2007), Ruben Molina said that in 1966,
after El Monte Legion Hall helped to establish the firm connections between rhythm and
blues and Chicano music, “Huggie [sic] Boy was the big DJ in the community and played
nothing but R&B that local Chicano bands were recording, [and all] the Chicano groups
in L.A. were covering popular R&B tunes and oldies” (Hernandez 2009). However, while
Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg was an important disc jockey in terms of the proliferation of
Chicano oldies and rhythm and blues, other disc jockeys (DJ’s) also contributed to this
proliferation; and, perhaps the most important and famous of these disc jockeys is Art
Laboe.

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Art Egnoian aka Art Laboe is an Armenian American who was born in Salt Lake
City, Utah in 1925. According to Los Angeles Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez,
Figure 5. Art Laboe; artlaboe.com/Bio.html; 14 Sept 2012 Web.
“Laboe started his own amateur station in 1938 out of his bedroom in South Los
Angeles” when he was only 13 years old. Bermudez also says that when Art Laboe began
as a disc jockey, he operated out of Scrivner’s Drive-In theater and would often take
requests from teenagers and give live on-air dedications to their sweethearts (Bermudez
2009). Laboe was also part of that group of music producers that promoted shows at El
Monte’s Legion Auditorium. Naturally, much of the music he played on the radio was
performed by those artists he promoted. Nonetheless, Laboe was also the first radio disc
jockey to play both African American and white music on the air; and, he was also the
first music producer to compile a list of oldies music. “Art assembled the first album in
American history to feature hits by different artists. This first compilation album, entitled
“Oldies But Goodies,” was released by Art’s company, Original Sound Record Company,
Inc., and stayed on Billboard’s Top 100 LP’s chart for over three years” (artlaboe.com)

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and archived the musical “coalition and cultural exchange” between the African
American and Chicano communities in Los Angeles.
Moreover, according to Susan Straight, professor of creative writing at U.C.
Riverside, “In 1951 Laboe built his own ‘roving radio’ truck, a mobile DJ booth that had
regular stops on street corners on Jefferson, Manchester, and Crenshaw in South LA,
among other places.” By 1956, Laboe tells Straight, he was the first DJ to play rock and
roll on the West Coast. Laboe was the inventor of the term “oldies but goodies,”—a term
he used when teens requested songs by Big Joe Turner and other older R&B stars. Laboe
told Straight in an interview that people wanted ‘an old song, but it had to be a good one’
(Straight 2011). After years of continuing to play oldies music and take dedications on
the air, Art Laboe solidified a tradition of using music to send messages to loved ones
and even to enemies through what seems to have always been a panethnic musical
tradition in R&B that was situated in the predominantly African American and Chicano
communities of south and east Los Angeles.
Susan Straight also points to the overall message of these dedications that Laboe
has been delivering over the years: the message of love. In her article “Listening to Art
Laboe” (2011), she writes, “Art Laboe’s Killer Oldies show has always been about—
love, the idea of love, missing love, remembering love, hoping for love.” She adds, “For
many of us who grew up in a certain time, in certain neighborhoods in California, his
voice and those songs are as iconic as Route 66 winding through San Bernardino,
Valencia orange groves in Riverside and Corona and Pomona, and crowded drive-ins in
El Monte” (Straight 2011). She notes that the people in Los Angeles and California in

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general have different musical tastes as a way to qualify her allusions to Route 66; and,
she even recognizes the differences that exist in age that allow for preferences of other
kinds of music—as with her teenage daughters. Still, she writes, “the people who live
where I do, we wait for Etta James to sing “At Last,” as she does nearly every evening at
this time. We wait for Ralfi Pagan “To Say I Love You” and Brenton Wood to declare
that “Only the Strong Survive.” More importantly, Straight writes:
Growing up, I knew people who called Art Laboe’s show to send
greetings and dedications to their families who moved around to harvest
grapes in Dinuba and Mecca. And always there have been women who
send dedications to family members in prison. It’s a code many of us
know: to send a song to someone in Chino, Delano, Calipatria and
mention that you got a letter, or are urging your listener to ‘keep your head
up,’ to send the Brenton Wood song, means you’re talking to someone
behind bars (2011).
Esmeralda Bermudez, in her article about Art Laboe, adds that Laboe’s voice is still
“cherished by Latinos” and that the “84-year-old disc jockey helps them [Latinos]
celebrate anniversaries, mourn their dead and profess their love.” Bermudez says, “He is
the intermediary who reconciles arguments, encourages couples to be affectionate, sends
out birthday wishes and thank yous” (2009). She also quotes Ruben Molina who tells her
that Art Laboe’s “ ‘show was the first place a young Chicano kid had to air his feelings,
the first place you could say something and be heard.’” Molina continues by telling her,
“‘It was like an intercom where you could tell the world -- our world -- 'I'm sorry' or 'I

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love so-and-so' and everyone knew the next day’” (Bermudez 2009). Thus, the
emergence of Chicano music but specifically Chicano rhythm and blues/“Chicano
oldies,” is a musical genre that is intimately connected to a primarily Chicano and
African American political, cultural, and economic struggle in the United States that is
filtered through radio disc jockeys like Art Laboe. More importantly, in the face of these
struggles, it is the dominant musical tradition that is used to convey messages of love and
hope, and loss and grief, in the Chicano community and within this tradition an affective
politics of possibility is evident. Namely, oldies were affective expressions of
Chicano/Latino men and gang members and this music was also utilized by others in the
Chicano/Latino community (women writing to loved ones in prison, men and women
calling into Art Laboe’s radio show to dedicate a song, etc.) to respond to this affective
tradition.
Dedications, Chicano Oldies, & the Epistolary Form: Transmitting the
Chicano/Latino Soul
Listening to Art Laboe’s Killer Oldies show and making dedications over the
radio became, as Susan Straight, Ruben Molina and Esmeralda Bermudez have all noted,
one of the many ways Chicanos/Latinos in the southwest
38
communicate love, loss, and
other emotions for the Chicano and working class communities in Los Angeles, CA and
the U.S. southwest. It became so commonplace that these musical dedications often made
their way into letters—especially prison letters. Susan Straight says, it is a “code many of
us know.” So as I grew up in the Ramona Gardens housing projects, with many friends
who had gone to prison and sent letters with such dedications back home, I learned those
codes and often reproduced them. These coded letters had a formula, and crafting such

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letters was not exclusive to my neighborhood; nor were they exclusive to prison letter
writing. This tradition of letter writing that operated on access to the cultural knowledge
of oldies music readily made its way into every day life in East L.A. In fact, at the age of
14, a freshman in high school in East Los Angeles, a young girl in my school wrote me
one such letter; and, as I said, it was not a letter from prison but it was a “prison” letter. It
read
39
:
Dear Jose,
Darling Baby, As I sit here, thinking of me and you, and the Touch of you,
I am Wishing on a Star that one day you will be Forever Mine, even
though Daddy's home. I'm the one who really loves you. I been a Sad Girl
and there have been Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. I keep going in
circles. I want you to Look over your shoulder, and tell her, that I will
Never give you up. I need you so and, If this world were mine, we would
be making love Between the Sheets. Loving you, is all I want to do. Oh my
Angel Baby, all I want is for us to be Two Lovers. I want to pay you back
but all I can do is cry. At this time, I’d Rather Go Blind because I do love
you, and I'm Confessing a Feeling. I’ve been searching, searching for my
baby and, Now, Look at me I'm in Love...
The original letter from this young woman did not highlight or italicize the song titles or
song lyrics as I have done above. She did not need to highlight these titles and lyrics
because she assumed that I would be conversant and familiar with these songs. She knew
I had access to this particular cultural knowledge. And, I did. This is the “code” to which

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Susan Straight alludes in her essay; and, this code, this shared musical repertoire that
exists primarily among Chicanos but also African Americans and other working class
people who understand how such music emerged, attributes greater affective meaning to
each word in the letter. In this respect, the linguistic sign does not simply point to a fixed
signification; it points to and evokes another form of cultural and emotional signifiers.
The greeting in my letter, for example, calls up in my consciousness the words of that
song by the Elgins. “Darling baby,” it begins, “Life is so lonely without you” and then it
repeats with emphasis, “Life is lonely without you. Since you gone and left these arms of
mine.” In this way, the young girl who wrote me this letter used the context and material
of the song in the same way other writers use allusions to great works of literature.
However, where other writers reference a literary repertoire, she references a musical
one. More importantly, this young woman knew that using such songs to communicate
her feelings was a kind of cultural short-hand that would resonate with me.
Through this style of writing, as a result, Chicano/Latino gang members in prison
are able to make similar allusions and through epistolary form simultaneously
communicate messages of love, loss, or grief to the recipient of such letters in spaces like
prison that generally do not allow for such expressions. It also metaphorically (and to
some degree, quite literally) begins to soundtrack real life relationships between
Chicanos/Latinos inside and outside of prisons. As of late, many Chicanos and
Chicanas—gang members and otherwise—began to tattoo the titles and lyrics of songs on
their bodies as a way to emotionally express themselves. One of the first tattoos to be
popularized in this fashion was Rose Royce’s 1978 song, “Love Don’t Live Here
Anymore.” Many Chicano gang members would tattoo this title on their chests as a way

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to express heartache over betrayal by their lovers, families, or other loved ones. Or, they
expressed the feelings of abandonment emphasized in the song through these tattoos as a
response to the often difficult conditions of poverty in the barrio. In this respect, the song
is explicitly clear. It begins, “You abandoned me/ Love don’t live here anymore” and
continues to repeat the refrain and adds, “Love don’t live here anymore/ just emptiness
and memories of what we had before/…Everyone can clearly see/ the loneliness inside of
me.” It ends by repeating its simple refrain, “Love don’t live here anymore” to screaming
fans who seem to understand such heartbreak, “loneliness,” and “emptiness.” Tattoos of
songs like this also work to trouble the dichotomy between the emotional/corporeal,
which is often a deeply gendered binary that suggests women are more closely aligned
with the emotional and men with the corporeal or physical. To articulate through a
permanent bodily inscription that “Love don’t live here anymore” is to tell one’s
community of the pain and loss suffered through heartache.
The resonance of such a song among Chicano gang members is also very clear to
people who have access to this cultural knowledge related to oldies music. In the context
of barrios on the eastside of Los Angeles and, as I point to above, in prisons in California,
these Chicanos cannot express such emotions openly without risking being labeled
“weak” and “effeminate” by the strictly regulated homosocial and stereotypically
hypermasculine groups that are Chicano/Latino gangs. Therefore, as the song makes clear
the loneliness felt by the abandoned lover, “Everyone can clearly see/ the loneliness
inside of me,” these feelings literally become a refrain and soundtrack, and an acceptable
form of affective expression, of the life of many Chicano/Latino gang members through
the process of tattooing these titles on their bodies.

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Chicanas and Latinas have also engaged with these particular codes and the
transmission of emotional messages through oldies music and tattooing. Valerie Arzate,
Figure 6. Photograph by José Navarro. Valerie Arzate’s “Portrait of Lalo” (2012).
who grew up in the Ramona Gardens housing projects in East Los Angeles, tattooed the
portrait of her partner “Lalo” on her leg (see figure 6 above) as a way to remember him
after his death. More importantly, as the above image makes clear, Valerie chooses to
remember Lalo not only through his portrait but also through the Isley Brothers’ 1975
song “For the Love of You” that begins with the lyrics tattooed on her leg that read
“Drifting on a Memory.” Furthermore, the connection between oldies music, Chicano
cultural life, and gang membership is made most evident not only through the song lyrics

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on her leg but also through the gang initials (BH) that signal Lalo’s membership in the
Big Hazard gang located in the Ramona Gardens housing projects in East L.A.
In addition, Chicanos/Latinos have also created different media DVDs with their
own soundtracks that function not only to create the kind of “audiospatiality” that Josh
Kun suggests is possible with music but also to transmit emotional messages that
commemorate dead Chicano/Latino gang members. One such homemade DVD (see
figure 7 below), created by Lydia “Huera” Hernandez who is also from the Ramona
Gardens housing projects, is titled “Gone But Not Forgotten.” The DVD is a
Figure 7. Lydia “Huera” Hernandez. “Gone but not Forgotten” DVD Cover (2012).

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photographic montage of different homeboys from the Big Hazard gang who have died
and the images that travel across the screen are set to a soundtrack that is incredibly
similar to the compilation put together by Art Laboe in his “Oldies but Goodies”
collection. The soundtrack begins with the Manhattans 1973 song, “There’s No Me
Without You” and ends with Judy Collins’ 1970 rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
The images in this DVD, set to this oldies soundtrack, also include pictures of
Chicano/Latino homeboys as children and teenagers; it shows them with their families,
their children, and with their homeboys and homegirls in the neighborhood. This
representation and soundtracking of Chicano/Latino gang members in East L.A. contrasts
with the dominant representations of these figures in mainstream media. The combination
of this soundtrack and the personal images/photographs of these homeboys, as a result,
represent a multidimensional, complex representation of Chicano/Latino gang life in
particular and Chicano/Latino cultural life in East Los Angeles in general. As I intimated
above, then, this soundtracking is the primary way particular histories of struggle and
messages of love, pain, suffering, and loss, become undercurrents in other cultural
productions like film that resonate with Chicano audiences in general and Chicano/Latino
gang members in particular. Let me, therefore, return to my consideration of the
soundtracks in La Mission (2009), American Me (1992), and Boulevard Nights (1979).
The section titled, “The Music of La Mission” is part of the “Special Features” of
the DVD for the film. In this section, director Peter Bratt and lead actor Benjamin Bratt
briefly explain that the original idea for the film was inspired by a relative of theirs
named Che—“a lowrider O.G.” (P.Bratt). They note that Che was one of the originators

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of the first lowrider car clubs in the Mission district and that he was also a consultant on
the film. The Bratt brothers say that Che helped them create the scene of Che’s (the
character in La Mission) garage, determine which cars should belong to the character, and
which music would soundtrack that particular character in the film. Peter Bratt says that
Che—the real life model for the character—was very specific about the dress, cars, and
music that would define the character in the film. He was “very specific” about that
“aesthetic” (P. Bratt).
Peter Bratt, in addition, provides a greater context for these decisions—a context
that includes growing up in San Francisco, going to school in the Mission, and growing
up with parents who were politically active in the 1960s and 1970s. He says, “Our mother
was an activist during the sixties and seventies and we were kids during that time and so
there was a lot of political activism, cultural renaissance, and creativity. Art…went hand
in hand with the politics of the day and music was a huge, huge part of that” (P. Bratt).
Benjamin Bratt agrees and adds that “what was going on musically, not just in the
country but in particular in the community that’s in the film, the Mission, was perhaps
some of the most complex, interesting music that lives on today” (B. Bratt). Moreover,
Peter Bratt specifically said that he wanted someone to score the film who is from the
neighborhood or from the city. He says he wanted someone who “really understands the
culture and the music that the O.G. lowriders listen to” and someone who “knows about
Chicano culture and Aztec traditions.” Nevertheless, Peter Bratt hired Mark Kilian—a
white South African composer who, at the onset of the filmmaking process, did not even
know the meaning of a Chicano.

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The Instrumentality of the Score
Despite his lack of knowledge about Chicanos, Kilian managed, through the
instruments he used to score the film, maintain and reproduce a Chicano aesthetics in the
film. Kilian, for example, uses the “charango”—a Bolivian guitar-like stringed
instrument made from the shell of an armadillo—for the “main voice of a lot of the
melodic stuff” and he uses Native American flutes “melodically and to create some
textures” (Killian); and, he uses Tibetan temple bowls to create “ambient sounds.” He
also importantly employs Aztec instruments in the score like the Teponaztli—a wooden
box percussion instrument that is played by hitting it with padded drumsticks—and the
Panhuehuetl (a large wooden drum that is made with deerskin). In addition, he uses a
clay, Mexican ocarina to complete the instruments used to score the film. Finally, he
employs Estaire Godinez—a Latina woman from the Mission district—to perform the
vocals. The soundtrack of La Mission exemplifies, therefore, one way a film’s soundtrack
becomes an instrumentality of Chicanismo in popular culture.
However, it is also the Chicano politics of the Bratt brothers, noted above, that
ultimately governs the musical manifestation of Chicanismo in the film. This is perhaps
best exemplified by their choice in a musical director for the film. Peter Bratt hired Greg
Landau, the San Francisco-based music producer to be the Music Director for the film.
Benjamin Bratt says that Landau is “a Latin Rock historian” and Peter Bratt adds, “He
[Landau] is a professor of musicology.” Greg Landau is, in fact, affiliated with the
University of California at Santa Cruz’s Latin American and Latino Studies department.
More importantly, however, he contextualizes his own musical emergence in the Mission
district in the late 1970s and points out an alliance with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

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“The Mission was a hotbed of creativity and musical experimentation, alive with poetry,
dance, music from all over Latin America as well as political movements that used
combined [sic] these cultural currents into their activities. In 1979, the Sandinistas
marched into Managua and the Mission District was alive with celebration as this
neighborhood was the center of the solidarity movement” (greglandau.com). Landau also
notes his participation in Nicaragua with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture, his work in
Cuba, and his return to San Francisco. Landau’s participation in social and political
movements in Latin America and his musical career have also informed the music groups
who have formed early and late embodiments of Chicano music: he has worked with the
lead singer of Malo, Tower of Power, Dr. Loco and his Rockin’ Jalapeño Band, Quetzal,
and Ozomatli. Thus, Landau becomes another “instrument” through which Chicanismo is
inflected into the film.
Unlike La Mission, Boulevard Nights (1979) and its soundtrack is more contrived
and reflects a superficial understanding of the Chicano cultural and musical code that I
describe above. What makes this soundtrack remotely Chicano or Latino is that the score
was written and performed by Lalo Schifrin. Schifrin was born in Argentina and is a
classically trained pianist and composer. In 1958, Schifrin came to the United States and
began playing with Dizzie Gillespie and, subsequently, scoring film and television shows
like Mission Impossible (1966). Schifrin maintains that he has been influenced by jazz
and rhythm and blues. However, his score for Boulevard Nights seems to rely more on a
classically Spanish musical tradition rather than the mixed Aztec/indigenous tradition of
the soundtrack for La Mission.

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Boulevard Nights, nonetheless, does not miss the mark completely. As I note in
chapter 2, one of the key scenes and the overall soundtracking for Chuco engages with
the oldies/R&B repertoire that I point out above. The film’s soundtrack seems to set a
tone that suggests Chuco and Latino gang members like him are socially and emotionally
backward; and standard cinematic practices like cutting back and forth between
characters, along with the soundtrack changes from disco to oldies or doo wop
40
, works
to reinforce negative feelings about Chuco and positive feelings about Raymond. These
musical shifts are salient because the genres signify both a logic progress and a regressive
nostalgia in the Chicano and Anglo imagination for the eras that produced such music
(i.e. the social/political context I provide for oldies and R&B above).
Nonetheless, the deployment of oldies music in the film, despite the reading that
suggests a “backwardness” to characters like Chuco, ultimately allows for greater
affective variability for Chuco than it does for Raymond. Because those people who are
more likely to identify with Chuco and the oldies that are his soundtrack, the music
creates a space for the expression of love, loss, and grief for him, and an affective
identification with the audience. In the scene where Raymond confronts Chuco for
missing his wedding, Chuco, again unable fully to articulate his feelings, relies on the
soundtrack to convey complex emotions like anger, disappointment, and remorse. At the
moment Chuco and Raymond reconcile, an oldies track begins to play.
The soundtrack for American Me (1992), by contrast, is more akin to the type of
“prison” letter I describe above. The official soundtrack, for example, lists songs whose
titles, taken together, read like the letter above. They are: “No Sunshine
41
,” “Slippin’ Into
Darkness,” “Rockin’ Robbin,” “Shotgun,” “Heaven and Paradise,” “Let the Good Times

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Roll,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Oye Como Va,” “For Your Precious Love,” and,
“Tierra Brava.” In other words, the very first song sets the overall tone of the movie and
expects that the audience is conversant, at the very least with Bill Withers’ original song,
“Ain’t No Sunshine” but also with the narrative in Kid Frost’s adaptation. In Frost’s rap
remake of Bill Wither’s 1971 classic, he narrates the story of a young (presumably
Chicano) man who is quickly caught up in the gang life and sent to prison. The song
reads as follows:
I’ve seen the manifestations of the street,
so I could manifest what I see on a drumbeat.
Like just last night
I watched these two vatos get in a crazy fight.
One of them was quick to pull a knife
he stabbed ‘em in the heart,
and now he’s doing life
in prison at the age of 21.
Living on Death Row
cuz he couldn’t let go.
Caught in the web of violence.
Roll deep when they creep
in silence…of the lambs.
A tattoo tear drop as the iron gate slams (Frost, 1992).
Of course, this initial song in the sequence is intended, much like Edward James Olmos
has designed the movie, to act as a cautionary tale. And, it arguably succeeds on two

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levels. First, the use of Bill Wither’s original song calls up the kind of cultural and
musical repertoire of “old school” Chicanos. It also lends credibility to Kid Frost’s
engagement with rap as a musical genre. In other words, in the Chicano/Latino
community in the early 1990s, rap was considered exclusively an African American
musical genre; and, it was resisted and racialized negatively as such by many Chicano
nationalist gang members. The use of Wither’s original, as a result, “speaks” to an older
Chicano generation while the use of rap “speaks” to a young generation of
Chicanos/Latinos. Equally important, is the “tear drop” tattoo that Frost refers to at the
end of the first stanza of his song. This tattoo is a Chicano/Latino gang cultural code that
indicates one has been to prison.
More than the lyrics of this particular song, the artists who perform them also
reinforce the way in which Chicanismo is soundtracked. War, while being a mixed-race
musical group from San Pedro, CA, appears on the soundtrack because the group was a
“favorite among Chicano teenage audiences” and made tributes to the Chicano folk
heroes like “Cisco Kid.” More importantly, War registers in the Chicano/Latino
imagination because of tracks like “Low Rider,” and “Cinco de Mayo” (Molina, 128,
2002). Moreover, Los Lobos’ performance of “Shot Gun,” on the soundtrack is perhaps
one of the most symbolic performances and tracks in the list. This performance by Los
Lobos symbolically exemplifies the process whereby Chicanos have arguably
appropriated R&B as their own. The original track was a single R&B song played by
Junior Walker & the All Stars in 1965.
Nevertheless, these musical genres—R&B and “Chicano” Music/Oldies—are part
of the historic panethnic tradition of music that emerged in Los Angeles and the greater

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Southwest. As George Lipsitz points out, it is precisely the reason why, “the first L.A.
Chicano rock and roll star turned out to be a Hungarian Jew
42
, produced and promoted by
a Greek
43
who thought of himself as Black!” (Otis/Lipsitz xxvii). Of course the definition
of Chicano oldies I have put for above is troubling because it does not fit neatly into one
racial category. However, if we consider that race is a construct and ethnicity and culture
become more accurate terms to describe people, than the claim that R&B is Chicano is a
legitimate claim. And, it makes it possible for War to write and perform songs like
“Cisco Kid.”
More importantly, such music has truly become the soundtrack to Chicano (and
African American) life in the barrios of California and, I’m sure, in the ghettos of the
United States. This musical genre “speaks” to us; it reminds us of the struggles we have
shared. The pain of racism, discrimination, and poverty we suffer in our communities. It
carries with it the pain and loss of brothers, fathers, sisters, and mothers who have been
locked up in prisons in the United States at alarming rates. But this music also allows us
to send those people messages of love and hope. War’s song “Don’t Let No One Get You
Down” is always a favorite dedication to those locked up. And, of course, “I’ll Always
Love My Momma.” Perhaps most telling is not whether or not this music constitutes an
“audiotopia” but how, in fact, it engenders layered affective possibilities for Chicana/os
and Latina/os. In this vein the work of José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then
and There of Queer Futurity (2009) proves very useful. Muñoz asks a critical question in
his work about the performativity of utopia through music and musical stages saying,
“…how do we enact utopia?” (97). He suggests the performances of utopia are complex
and multidirectional and often expressed through “the emotional work of negative affect”

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(97). Therefore, I contend the issue with simply suggesting that postnational and
hybridized forms of Chicano/a music are utopian is that an “audiotopia” points to an
ideal, and as Muñoz points out, it is then “something that should mobilize us, push us
forward”, which is quite positive, but as he quickly notes as well “Utopia is not
prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of
possibility…” (97). While these possibilities might give people hope of differentiated
daily lives that do not consistently reflect the residues of imperial/colonial dominations, it
remains as Muñoz says, “a world not quite here.” Thus, because the imperial/colonial
representations and, to some degree, the racial formations in the U.S. of Chicanos are
written as monolithically hopeless, part of the decolonial resistance to this casting is to
trouble the affective attachments to the notion of utopia. What I mean by this is that the
political possibilities of this Chicano/Latino soundtracking is located in both the positive
affects such as love, desire and hope and in the negative affects of loss, grief, anger and
shame expressed by Chicanos/Latino through oldies music. In fact, negative affect, while
not readily represented in theorizations of sound like that of Audiotopia, is in fact one site
of the affective that can be very productive. Emotions like those mentioned of loss, grief,
anger and shame are often responses to the realities of police brutality, poverty and
racism experienced by communities of color, and even more specifically, by
Chicano/Latino gang members. Here, again, the theorization of utopia by Muñoz proves
most useful as he argues, “utopia is about a politics of emotion…[However,] This is not
to say hope is the only modality of emotional recognition that structures belonging;
sometimes shame, disgust, hate, and other “negative” emotions bind people together”
(97). Furthermore, the binding together of Chicano/Latino gang members through the

140
cultural, audio and lyrical codes of oldies could be understood as one way to enact
resistance to dominant white power structures. I say this because in thinking about
Muñoz and his theorization of queer futurity, and how queer people are seen as a people
without a future based on a heteronormative notion of reproductivity, it is also the case
that poor and working class communities of color are socially and politically inscribed as
hopeless and, thus, without a promising future. So, when these communities are bound
together—as often black and brown communities are through R&B music as noted
earlier—it may be one manifestation of resistance against the domination and violence of
white supremacy.
Moreover, as I reflect on the role that oldies music plays in the Chicano/Latino
imagination, it occurs to me that one could argue that allowing music to express complex
emotions like love, loss, and grief is a crutch or proxy that implies that the community
remains incapable of expressing such emotions on its own—that such a reliance on music
does not allow Chicanos but especially Chicano men to articulate and be responsible for
their own feelings. However, much like the role of soundtracks in film, I believe this
music—especially Chicano oldies—adds another dimension to these feelings rather than
formulates a crutch or simple proxy. As a result, rather than absolving Chiano/Latino
men of being responsible for their emotional expressions and lives, it may in fact make an
emotive life possible in the face of poverty and racism. It also ensures a type of
authenticity because it uses Chicano oldies to presuppose that one has some Chicano
cultural capital; and, since it acts like a coded language, it embodies many of the
sociolinguistic characteristics of a dialect related to concrete experiences in the barrio.
So, in this way, this music and the expressions of the music through tattoos, prison

141
letters, or radio dedications in some ways challenges the fixed and univalent
representations of Chicano/Latino masculinity by offering multiple avenues to express
one’s feelings of barrio and/or prison life. Importantly, this possibility draws on the
longer history of racialized subjects and their affective use of music. Namely, it is well
documented that slaves utilized the genre of spiritual music to express sorrow and, in a
way, talk back to the conditions of violence and domination that directed their daily lives
and this sonic use offered a sense of relief, even if only in the moment the song was sung
or heard. While I do not conflate the distinctions of domination for slaves with that of
contemporary poor communities of color, I do think it is possible to see the use of oldies
as an expressive mode in this longer continuum of expressing relief by articulating
sadness, love, loss, or any variety of emotions through music. Perhaps this is what Lalo
Guerrero and Don Tosti knew from the beginning, and it is what distinguishes Chicano
listening practices related to rhythm and blues and Chicano oldies. !Pues orale!

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CONCLUSION

And the Answer Was Revolt

In the fall of 2010, the University of Southern California hosted the 37
th

anniversary of the original 1973 Flor y Canto festival. During the festival, standing in for
his father José Montoya, Richard Montoya recounted the story of how his father and José
Antonio Burciaga went to New York City to meet Miguel Piñero in 1974. As Richard
Montoya relays the story his father told him, he says that Piñero, while standing on a
corner on the Lower East Side, asks the older Montoya and Burciaga: “What is the
greatest Chicano poem of all time?” Richard Montoya says that his father and Burciaga
went back and forth in their considerations: El Louie? Maybe one of Burciaga’s poems,
etc. Finally, according to Richard Montoya, his father says that Piñero stops the
discussion by refusing all the suggestions and points to a tattoo on his own arm that
reads: “Mi Vida Loca.” Thus, the Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero points to one of the key
subcultural elements of Chicano and Latino cultural nationalist formations: una vida loca.
In Machos y Malinchistas, I set out to understand and contextualize the complex,
literary and ideological discourses that developed from the experience of
Chicanos/Latinos in urban centers in the U.S. like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and
simultaneously from the efforts of Chicanos/Latinos to tell their own stories about
growing up in these barrios. It was a humble attempt to provide some insight into barrio
thought, Chicano/Latino—predominantly male—gang identity, and its sexual politics as
they all relate to the formation of Chicano/Latino nationalism. I chose to analyze
Chicano/Latino gang narratives because mainstream, late 20
th
century American

143
representations of Chicano/Latino gang members almost universally condemn them and
what they represent (i.e. condemn them as figures whose very existence, much like
Chicano/Latino identity in general, is considered outside the law and at the very margins
of “American” society).
Moreover, I undertook this project because, as I note in the introduction, Octavio
Paz, in an interview with José Armas suggested that the pachuco was the precursor to the
Chicano. Luis Leal, in his article, notes that Armas asks Paz: “‘Do you agree that the
pachuco is the precursor of the Chicano?’” and Paz replies, “‘Yes, I believe, in a certain
way, the pachuco is the precursor of the Chicano.” Importantly, Armas also notes that
Paz says, “‘When I examined him [the pachuco]…I found…an attitude of desperation in
the face of the situation he confronted. And the answer was revolt” (Leal, 118). Yet,
despite the connections made by Octavio Paz, José Armas, Luis Leal, and other scholars,
Chicano/Latino gang figures continue to create an underlying discomfort not only for
mainstream American society but also for our own community such that many Chicana/o
and Latina/o scholars who treat Chicano/Latinos gangs as subjects of study often include
apologies and distance themselves from the violence, homophobia, racism and other
troubling elements of Chicano/Latino gang life. Usually, these scholars make the point of
“understanding” the violence, homophobia, etc. that Chicano/Latino gang members
subscribe to, but these scholars simultaneously feel the need to also condemn such acts of
violence and ideologies. In short, these scholars find themselves in the precarious
positions of having to apologize for and distance themselves from a segment of their own
communities. Of course, we should all resist oppressive racist, homophobic, and sexist
logics; nonetheless, such positioning by Chicana/o and Latina/o scholars implicitly

144
responds to a racist logic that might blame these scholars for the violence, homophobia,
sexism, etc. of Chicano/Latino gang members by virtue of racial/ethnic association. By
contrast, white scholars do not feel the need to apologize for or distance themselves from
the violence they study among white Americans like Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, or
Scott Peterson. Nonetheless, this process of distanciation by Chicana/o and Latina/o
scholars illustrates the discomfort and ambiguity that real and fictional representations of
Chicano/Latino gang members engender, and this is another point at which my project
intervenes.
This magnified look at gang life through Chicano/Latino gang narratives allowed
me to unapologetically provide for a different, perhaps more empathetic rather than
sympathetic, perspective on the phenomena that lead to the formation of Chicano/Latino
gangs, their unflinching subscription to a Chicano/Latino nationalisms, and, yes, their
reproductions of heteropatriarchal and racist logics of domination. Nonetheless, I often
found myself rejecting and challenging many of the characterizations of Chicano/Latino
gang members in mainstream news media and on television because most of these
narratives relied on overgeneralizations, gross stereotypes, and an inferential racial
politics of fear when they represented Chicano/Latino gangs.
My analysis of representations and narratives of Chicano/Latino gang life,
therefore, offered many differences in perspective when compared with mainstream
representations. It offered moments of reconciliation and possibilities for empathy with
these other members of the Chicano/Latino community. Despite such an empathetic
analytical perspective, even these treatments of Chicano/Latino gangs as an academic
subjects still carry with them this element of discomfort. Yet, in accepting this element of

145
discomfort with respect to Chicano/Latino gang narratives and representations, I have
concluded that in many ways, particularly through the cultural products examined in the
previous three chapters, Chicano/Latino gang narratives self-consciously and
ambivalently offer both the possibility to reproduce and challenge the logics of
imperialism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal masculinity—especially as they relate to
the sexual politics of Chicano/Latino gang members. Furthermore, I posit that this
ambivalence and tension is productive; it is the site of progress and decolonization for the
most militant of our communities—Chicano/Latino gang members—to grapple with their
own demons.
Additionally, my examination remains invested in a postcolonial analytic, which
underscores the ways that representations of men of color reproduce a stereotypical
machismo, especially in gang narratives, and suggests that these are reproductions of a
racialized “model of manhood” introduced by the colonial situation. This critique also
contributes to the analysis of sexual violence adeptly advanced by Andrea Smith in
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005) and directly addresses
the many moments of discomfort that Chicana/o and Latina/o scholars have found
themselves in with respect to sexual violence within our own communities. Smith, when
addressing the question of sexual violence committed by Native men in particular, says,
“Of course, Indian men do commit acts of sexual violence. After years of colonialism and
boarding school experience, violence has been internalized within Indian communities.”
To which she importantly adds: “this view of the Indian man [and, by extension, other
men of color] as the ‘true’ rapist [however,] serves to obscure who has the real power in
this racist and patriarchal society” (27). Akin, therefore, to Smith’s contention about

146
Native men, I cannot excuse any act of sexual violence committed by Chicano/Latino
men but I can recognize the structures of domination and violence inflicted on entire
communities of color by the continued practices of neocolonialism/imperialism in the
context of the United States. It is, in fact, my contention that Chicano/Latino gangs, much
like Chicano/Latino nationalist groups like the Brown Berets and the Young Lords Party,
therefore, emerged as particular responses to such structures and ideologies of
domination in the U.S. As a result, I have attempted to triangulate the relationships
between Chicano/Latino gang-formation, the parallels between these gangs and other
nationalist militancies, and their respective sexual politics.
Through my analysis of the autobiographies by Piri Thomas and Luis Rodríguez,
the gang films Boulevard Nights, American Me, and La Mission, and, finally, through the
emergence of “Chicano Soul/Oldies,” I conclude that in the face of these imperialist,
heteropatriarchal, and racist frameworks, Chicano/Latino men are limited with respect to
the representations and realizations of their own masculinities and sexualities but
ultimately find ways to undermine and resist such frameworks. The result is that
Chicano/Latino gang narratives simultaneously resist and accommodate the dominant
ideologies that problematize Chicano/a Latino/a sexuality and Chicano/Latino male
social relations. Ultimately, such tensions and ambiguities are underscored in later gang
narratives like those in Peter Bratt’s La Mission, Rashaad Ernesto Green’s Gun Hill Road
(2011), and Dino Dinco’s latest documentary Homeboy (2012)—a film about
Chicano/Latino gang members in Los Angeles coming out as queer despite the threat of
violent retribution on the part of their former gangs—because Chicanos/Latinos are
forced to imagine themselves through the narrow heteronormative, patriarchal images of

147
men of color in a white supremacist nation-state and industry like Hollywood. Thus, one
can trace the undercurrents of the sexual politics in Chicano/Latino gang films beginning
with Boulevard Nights (1979), the character of Chuco played by queer Chicano actor
Danny De La Paz and the “marriage plot” narrative that I develop in chapter 2, and end
with the latest three films about Chicano/Latino straight men and their engagement with
their queer familias.
This project thus expands upon existing scholarship like that of Richard T.
Rodriguez in “Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic,” his understanding of the role of
familismo in his book Next of Kin, and recent cultural productions like Dinco’s newest
documentary Homeboy (2012). Machos y Malinchistas intervenes in disrupting the
mainstream representations of Chicano/Latino gang members as monolithic, stoic,
violent, and hypermasculine subjects in gang narratives created about rather than for or
by Chicanos/Latinos. That is, it offers complex, multidimensional looks at Latino gang
figures through which I position these men less as glorified figures of resistance and more
as examples of the layered possibilities of political resistance coupled with a larger
critique of the colonial/imperial histories embedded in the narratives they write, the
visual/aesthetic choices deployed by and about them, and the “audioscapes” that surround
their lives.
In addition, my focus on Chicano/Latino gang figures/narratives is integral to this
intervention into the field of Chicana/o studies because (1) Chicano/Latino gang
members/pachucos—at least since the 1940s—have figured prominently in the Mexican
American/Chicano imagination as both positive figures of resistance and negative figures
of criminality; (2) because Chicano/Latino nationalist organizations have borrowed or

148
reproduced the ethos of resistance that these Chicano/Latino gang groups embody; (3)
because what unites these two organizational models for these groups (i.e. nationalist
organizations and Chicano/Latino gangs) is that they both signify responses to the same
economic, social, and political conditions of repression targeted at the Chicano/Latino
community in the United States. Finally, because both Chicano/Latino nationalist groups
and gangs reproduce or have reproduced these same logics of heteropatriarchy, gendered
violence, and racist colonialism through their militant ethos, it seems necessary to focus
on Chicano/Latino gang narratives and the ambivalence and discomfort that such
narratives engender in our community in order to start to heal our community and begin
to decolonize our minds.
The exigency of continuing the process of decolonization in the context of
newcolonialism is best appreciated through the reproduction of homophobia in our
communities—especially because, as Frantz Fanon notes in Black Skin, White Masks
(1952), the sexual politics of the colonized and the colonizer are a prominent feature of
colonialism. Therefore, I have also concluded that the policing of Chicano/Latino
sexuality and their sexual politics, as they relate to Chicano/Latino gang narratives, really
functions as a way to reproduce and enforce a heteronormativity but only insofar as that
heteronormativity is part of a practice of colonial policing that disrupts “threatening”
(predominantly male) organizations. The best example of this function of the policing of
sexuality in the contemporary context is the reactionary position of some Chicano/Latino
nationalists when confronted by Chicana/Latina lesbian feminists about issues related to
gender equity and sexuality in the Chicano movement. The response of many
Chicano/Latino nationalists was that these women were “sell outs” because of their

149
sexualities, and that they threatened to divide the movement altogether. Thus, the
internalization of heteronormative logics of male power primarily served the interest of a
white racist and imperial structure because some Chicano/Latino nationalists could not
yield some semblance of (male) power; in this way, the subscription to such patriarchal
ideologies and the reaction to the perceived “threat” of homosexuality made collective
action against white racist and imperial power structures incredibly difficult for a
community that was invested in fighting for equality.
In the end, therefore, while I show how representations of Chicano
hypermasculinity stem from an internalization of and response to settler colonialist
hereropatriarchy—a reactionary formation that enables negative representations of brown
men to reinforce, by contrast, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy—, I also show and
argue for moments, even in negative representations, where alternative possibilities
exceed the framework of this colonialism. These positions also led me to the title of my
project, Machos y Malinchistas. Malinche, as is well documented, was unjustly
mythologized as the ultimate “traitor” in México’s national remembering of the history
between the Aztecs and the Spaniards. Nonetheless, Malinche gives birth to the modern
nation and is later reinterpreted as a heroine, feminist figure in the face of patriarchal and
colonial social relations (Alarcón). My analytical and theoretical conclusions in this
project, much like Malinche, occupy a contested terrain in which sexual politics,
colonialism, and translating difference subject positions become the locus of
decolonization.
In fact, the aim is to begin rupturing the hypermasculinist logic of both of these
representations and of the homosocial dynamic of Chicano/Latino nationalist

150
organizations themselves in pursuit of greater equity. The premise of which is that
ethnic/Chicano and Latino nationalisms as modes of resistance need to be reconfigured
around different social relations, or that as a community, we need to honestly engage with
and address practices of Chicano/Latino nationalism that we also strongly condemn—
such as those forms of nationalism deployed through gang membership. It is my hope
that these chapters put forward a greater ideological and political flux when theorizing
and/or understanding Chicano/Latino gang life and masculinity that move past the
limitations of rigid articulations of our community. This flux, I expect, incites a positive
solidarity through the cultural productions I discuss and, hopefully, leaves us with the
message put forward by California R&B group War, that perhaps I could not articulate
better—“Don’t Let No One Get You Down.”

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Endnotes

Introduction
1
Ebert’s framing here seems to reveal a subconscious inclination toward a Eurocentric social Darwinist
understanding of modern American society—one that suggests the brutality and criminality of “founding
fathers” while ignoring such the real victims of such violence (i.e. people of color in the United States). In
his review, then, the assumption is that “modern America was forged” by white immigrants and people of
color had little to do with its development.

2
Leo R. Chávez argues, while Latino and Mexican “migrations paralleled those of other immigrant
groups…Mexicans in particular have been represented as the quintessential ‘illegal aliens,’ which
distinguishes them from other immigrant groups.” See The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants,
Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford University Press, 2008.

3
Note Frederick Luis Aldama’s decolonial/anti-imperialist analysis of American Me in “Penalizing
Chicano/a Bodies in Edward J. Olmos’s American Me” in Decolonial Voices (2002).

4
Paz goes on to offer his own understanding of the origin and psychological condition of pachucos in the
U.S. but takes particular issue with the pachuco’s unwillingness to fit within his own parameters for
national belonging. He writes, “The pachucos are youths, for the most part of Mexican origin, who form
gangs in Southern cities; they can be identified by their language and behavior as well as by the clothing
they affect. They are instinctive rebels, and North American racism has vented its wrath on them more than
once. But the pachucos do not attempt to vindicate their race or the nationality of their forbears. Their
attitude reveals an obstinate, almost fanatical will-to-be, but this will affirms nothing specific except their
determination—it is an ambiguous one, as we will see—not to be like those around them. The pachuco
does not want to become Mexican again; at the same time, he does not want to blend into the life of North
America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma. Even his very
name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything. It is a
strange word with no definite meaning; or, to be more exact, it is charged like all popular creations with a
diversity of meanings” (13-14).

5
While I understand the particular differences and issues with naming for Mexican Americans,
Chicanos/as, Latinos/as, and self-identified Hispanics, I will deploy the term Latinos/as as a broader term
that encompasses Mexicans, Chicanas/os, Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans, and other national and ethnic groups
from Latin America unless it is necessary to distinguish these identities/groups.

6
The Dawes Act of 1887 is another example of such policies of settler colonialism and containment.

7
The use of the term “containment” is a conscious use because it can arguably be used as a synonym for
imprisonment. That is, imprisonment, in this light, symbolizes a greater degree, and a crude form of,
containment.

8
In the context of the United States and its imperial relationship to Latin America, Chicanos/as and
Latinos/as become segmented, segregated, and categorized as alien. According to Amy Kaplan, this has
historically been the relationships between the U.S. imperial power and the presence of the racial Other in
the U.S. and this phenomenon of incorporation and segregation is best exemplified by the racial history and
discourse of the United States. See Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity” in American Literature 70.3
(Sept. 1998): 581-606.

152

9
I use the construction (w)hole here to indicate both an imagined unified nation (see Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities) and the symbolic hole that is left after the Mexican-American War, 1846-48 and
the annexation of the Mexican northwest.

10
For a more complete discussion see Ann Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 2001.

Chapter One
11
Here I am borrowing from R.W. Connell’s articulation and critique of hegemonic masculinity in
Mascunlinities (2005).

12
For a significant discussion of the process where black men become agents of repression and reproduces
white racist power structures, see Jared Sexton’s article “The Ruse of Engagement: Black Masculinity and
the Cinema of Policing” in American Quarterly, 61 (1), 39-63, 2009.

13
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian argues in The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader (2006), “Historically the
border as a knowledge formation figures prominently within a critical vernacular pertaining to the cultures
of imperialism, nationalism, and neocolonialism as well as the polyvalent cultures of resistance and
affirmation.”

14
In Curtis Marez’s insightful analysis of Freddy Fender’s songs in the 1991 movie Rush in “Brown:
Politics of Working Class Chicano Style,” he notes that: “while the Mexicans lent the image of the vaquero
to their neighbors to the north, the image returned to Mexico wearing a six shooter and a Stetson.”
Moreover, he adds, “The cowboy macho image influenced the Mexican Revolution, but it was after the
revolution that the cycle was completed, with the singing charros of the Mexican movies. And, it was
about this same time that anthropologists and pyschoanalysts discovered machismo in Mexico and labeled
it a particularly Mexican way of life” (4).

15
Here I am borrowing from R.W. Connell’s articulation and critique of hegemonic masculinity in
Mascunlinities (2005).

16
Robert Tally, in his essay, “Believing in America: The Politics of American Studies in a Postnational
Era,” defines postnationalism as “specifically, the current condition, in the era of globalization, in which
the nation-state is no longer the locus classicus of culture, the economy, or even politics” (77).

17
For a more complete discussion on State violence see, Joy James, Resisting State Violence (1996).

18
I use the term “Trauma” despite its troubling theoretical foundation in Western medical and
psychological frameworks. In fact, in “Introduction: Mourning and Memory,” Rebecca Saunders and
Kamran Aghaie note that: “trauma is a category largely codified by Western medical and psychological
institutions” [and] “that ‘trauma studies’ as a field has been grounded in events and processes of Western
modernity” (Saunders-Aghaie 16).

19
For a more in depth discussion of social memory, see Paul Connerton’s How Society’s Remember
(1989).

Chapter Two
20
Fregoso also argues that many Chicano films interpellated an “ideal Chicano male subject” and,
therefore, reproduced heteropatriarchal logics of domination (132).

153

21
See the “about, by, and for” distinction that Rosa Linda Fregoso makes with respect to Chicano film in
The Bronze Screen (1993).

22
Edward James Olmos, in the 1980s, buys the rights to the script from Floyd Mutrux and then directs the
film released in 1992.

23
The film Gang!/Walk Proud (1979) was charged as being a racist film not only because it casts Robby
Benson as the leader of a Chicano gang but also because its narrative suggests that Robby leaves the gang
life and redeems himself as a result of falling in love with a white woman (Sarah) and discovering that his
father is really white. In addition, the film studio and producers were accused of profiting from the
publicity garnered as a result of tensions between the Venice 13 gang members who worked and consulted
on the film and their rival gang, Culver City 13. For an in depth overview of these issues see William
Knoedelseder’s “Filming ‘Gang’—A Westside Story.” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1978; and
Charles Schreger’s “Gang Movie Stirs Controversy.” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1979.

24
Specifically, for Chuco, the song is “Tonite, Tonite” (1957) by The Mello-Kings and appears on the East
Side Story Volume 8 compilation that has been widely circulated in East L.A.; and, for Raymond, the song
is generic disco music scored by Lalo Schifrin.

25
It is also important to note that Chuco does not attend Raymond and Shady’s wedding and his absence
can be read as a resistance to the particular heteronormativity that challenges carnalismo.

26
See Richard T. Rodríguez, “Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic” in Aztlán 31.2, Fall 2006.

27
Again, Curtis Marez writes: By assuming in this way an essential link between brownness and
masculinity, Anglos are able to disavow patriarchal structures at the same time they participate in them. As
long as Anglos are able to point to machismo, they can either ignore the excesses of white masculinity or
reimagine them as instances of courage or fortitude” (10).

28
See Katherine Boo, “The Marriage Cure,” The New Yorker, August 18, 2003.

29
“[T]erms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the
absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain,
the possibility of queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (2). See Lee
Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004.

30
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I lived and grew up in the Ramona Gardens housing
projects where much of American Me (1992) was filmed; and, I knew personally knew Charles “Charlie
Brown” Manriquez and Ana Lizarraga—the two consultants murdered shortly after the film.

31
Since the release of the film, it was widely reported that the Mexican Mafia attempted to extort Olmos
and wanted to kill him. See Jesse Katz, “Film Leaves a Legacy of Fear for More than a Year.” Los Angeles
Times, June 13, 1993.

32
We should note that his name arguably alludes to the Argentinian revoluationary Che Guevara, carries
the same amount of syllabus, and looks just like the name of the hero of the Cuban revolutionary in its
lexigraphy; it even carries the same amount of syllables.

154

33
See Richard T. Rodríguez, “Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic,” Aztlán 31.2, Fall 2006.

Chapter Three
34
Josh Kun makes a distinction between an understanding of the term “American” that points to a
primarily white racial and U.S.-centered identity and a more transnational “American” identity that is
inclusive of Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

35
An audiotopia, he writes, is “the space within and produced by a musical element that offers the listener
and/or the musician new maps for re-imagining the present social world” (22-23).

36
I think many Chicano scholars would disagree with the notion that caló’s “urban dialect” has its origins
in Spain. Certainly, Spanish as one of the languages that is integral to caló is undisputable but the slang or
“urban dialect” seems to come from the local barrios.
37
It is necessary at this point, because many of the musicians, groups, and songs that I will analyze in this
chapter are not literally “Chicano or Latino,” to set out the parameters for what I consider “Chicano”
oldies/rhythm and blues, and Chicano music. Certainly, many of the songs that I analyze in this chapter do
not appear, in terms of the racial/ethnic make-up of their musicians, their musical style, score, or tradition,
to be ethnically Chicano. Nevertheless, in treating many of these songs/texts as Chicano musical texts, I
borrow from the markers of Chicanismo used by Chicana/o Latina/o film scholars in their treatments of
film/texts. In their case, the definition of Chicana/o film is founded on the by, for, and about matrix
(Fregoso). With respect to oldies, then, the composition (or by) aspect of oldies applies primarily to
Chicano soul bands like Thee Midnighters but not to the majority of oldies musical performers like Brenton
Wood. Therefore, the categorizations of oldies music as a Chicano genre rests on the interplay between
how the music is performed for Chicanos/Latinos in general, and the way it resonates with (about) the
Chicano experience (i.e. the historical context for its production). With respect to the former element, the
crudest way to trouble this definition is to say that Chicanos have appropriated this musical genre and
oldies performers are merely playing to this consumer demographic; with respect to the latter element of
the musical genre, the analogy that film scholars make (i.e. the for element of Chicano film as with Salt of
the Earth directed by Herbert J. Biberman) is one that is premised on reception/intended audience.
Admittedly, this is a problematic and contested definition of Chicano “oldies” music but one that is
ultimately applicable.

38
Esmeralda Bermudez notes “The Art Laboe Connection plays in more than a dozen cities in four states
and draws about a million listeners a week” and that these states make up the U.S. southwest
(2009).

39
Note I have highlighted lyrics from songs or song titles in the letter.

40
Specifically, for Chuco, the song is “Tonite, Tonite” (1957) by The Mello-Kings and appears on the East
Side Story Volume 8 compilation that has been widely circulated in East L.A.; and, for Raymond, the song
is generic disco music scored by Lalo Schifrin.

41
This particular song refers to Kid Frost’s rap remake of the 1971 original by Bill Withers.

42
The reference here is to L’il Julian Herrera aka Ron Gregory who was adopted by a Chicano family in
Boyle Heights.

43
The reference here is to Johnny Otis.

155

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Machos y Malinchistas interrogates how Chicano nationalist cultural productions, after the Chicano movement (1960-2010), have posited a monolithic Chicano/Latino identity primarily based on a racist, heteropatriarchal nation-state model for nationalism that results in the formation of a “transcendental revolutionary Chicano [male] subject” (Fregoso). Furthermore, although this project examines how these literary, cinematic, and musical representations of Chicano/Latino men in late 20th century are strategically deployed by the mainstream media and also by Chicanos/Latinos to simultaneously reproduce and resist imperialist, racist, and heteropatriarchal logics of domination. It also highlights the process through which dominant cultural ideologies force Chicanas/os and Latinas/os to imagine themselves through the prism of a white racist, heteropatriarchal nation-state—one that ultimately regulates Chicano/Latino identity and sexuality. Such nationalist narratives, I argue, not only effect a symbolic erasure of Chicana and Latina women—especially with regard to representations of these women in the novels and films I analyze—but also fiercely regulate male Chicano/Latino sexuality. Therefore, many of these literary and cultural representations of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os—especially in gang narratives, and particularly with respect to representations of so-called “figures of resistance” like El Pachuco and El Cholo—reveal the effects of Spanish and U.S. colonial residues on the Chicano/Latino community while they underscore the history of racism and sexism in the U.S. ❧ In this respect, my preliminary conclusion is that the representations of Chicano/Latino men and their masculinities/sexualities in literature, film and music in the U.S. has largely been what I call a masking—or brown-facing—of the legacies of Spanish and U.S. imperialisms, heteropatriarchy, and racism in the country. Nevertheless, I maintain that such performances still form particularly cogent responses to state oppression and the underlying logics of domination. Furthermore, I argue that these literary, cinematic, and musical products create opportunities to disrupt these imperial logics. Finally, in my consideration of the ways that gender and sexuality mediate Chicano nationalist discourses, especially as these discourses relate to Chicano/Latino masculinity represented by Chicano/Latino gangs, I begin to rearticulate Chicano/a Latino/a identity as a part of a larger anti-racist, egalitarian, and anti-imperialist political identity that functions to “liberate [Chicano/a and other minority] constituencies from the subordinating forces of the state” (Rodríguez 2009). ❧ Consequently, Machos y Malinchistas utilizes the fields of American Studies, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies—specifically, Chicana/o Cultural Studies—, literary criticism, and other subaltern historiographies as key frameworks for understanding Chicana/o Latina/o nationalist cultural productions. My project draws upon recent Chicana/o Latina/o scholarship like Richard T. Rodríguez’s Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) and Ellie Hernández’s Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture (2009) and puts key elements of these respective texts into conversation with my analysis of Chicano/Latino nationalist texts—specifically, with regard to the way Chicano/Latino gang figures have been utilized as a conduit of Chicano nationalist resistance. More importantly, like Monica Brown’s Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives (2002), my project levels a critique of Chicano nationalism through the prisms of gender and sexuality in gang narratives. However, unlike Brown’s critique, which relies heavily on notions of citizenship that support a nation-state framework for constructions of the Chicana/o Latina/o identity, my critique offers a transnational and localized reimagining of the Chicana/o Latina/o “nation” that facilitates a disruption of nationalist positions and perspectives. My analysis, therefore, stages a transnational, stratified and feminist critique of Chicano/Latino masculinity and sexuality that is mediated through Chicano nationalism in these literary and cultural texts. ❧ Chapter 1 of my project puts Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967) in conversation with Luis J. Rodríguez’s Always Running (1993) in order to analyze the ways in which Chicano/Latino cultural nationalism and masculinity continues to develop and assert itself at the expense of women’s [especially Chicana/Latina women’s] bodies though sexual violence. I argue specifically that in these texts, sexual violence functions to make “conquerors” of subjugated men and to solidify homosocial relationships between them based on a form of violence that is rooted in imperialist conquests rather than nationalist projects. Nevertheless, I also argue that the representations in these texts by Thomas and Rodríguez present, at the very least, multidimensional Chicano and Latino figures—figures that attempt to deal with their own participation in and complicity with these systems of oppression. For example, in the work of Thomas, this means writing in the context of prison and, for Rodriguez, this is carried out through leveling critiques of the school, prison and police systems. To that end, I suggest that these two writers rely on the genre of autobiography to help articulate different, decolonial and transnational subjectivities for themselves and for Chicanos/Latinos in general. ❧ Chapter 2 examines cinematic representations of el cholo (i.e. the Chicano/Latino gang member) as a cultural signifier in the films Boulevard Nights (1979), American Me (1992), and La Mission (2009) because these films highlight the critical distinction that needs to be made with respect to the performance of different types of masculinities and Chicano/Latino nationalism, and how such performances relate to structures of oppression like the prison system. I argue that while these representations reinforce heteronormative and racist narratives related to Chicano/Latino gang members because they posit Chicano masculinity as the violent antithesis of a “benign” hegemonic white masculinity in order to maintain racist patriarchal structures of oppression, they also allow for representations that undermine such structures. One of the key distinctions among these films is film written, produced, or significantly controlled by Chicanos/Latinos themselves insofar as such influence creates greater complexity in representations of Chicano/Latino gang members, their masculinities/sexualities, and nationalism. ❧ Chapter 3 focuses on the connections between the musical collection of rhythm and blues in Art Laboe’s “Oldies but Goodies” volumes and how this type of music challenges static, stereotypical constructions of Chicanos and Latinos as nihilistic, hypermasculine, and tragic figures of the community. Through an analysis of these songs/lyrics and their deployment by Chicano/Latino gang members, I suggest a contiguity between these figures and African American musical traditions that highlights a radical potential to create a liberatory space akin to what Josh Kun calls an “audiotopia.” The connection, I suggest, reveals the varied and multivalent personhood of these Chicano/Latino men, and a complex articulation of their own masculinities through the ways this music helps them express complex emotions. In addition, I argue that oldies music also formulates a cultural and linguistic code that facilitates the transmission of these same complex emotions despite strictly regulated enactments of Chicano/Latino masculinity in gangs, in the barrio, and in prisons in California. ❧ Importantly, because my analyses focus on the discursive construction of a transcendental [male] Chicano/Latino subjectivity, it reveals how machismo—a racialized perfomance of hypermasculinity—is really a shadow of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. This argument expands on Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s (661, 1993) position that “[c]ontrary to the historically variable and shifting range of Hegemonic masculinities, the representation of the masculine identity of racially subordinated groups stands out for its monologic and homogeneous economy, particularly in the case of Latinos.” My research suggests that Chicano/Latino music, particularly, “oldies” music, offer a literal and symbolic “soundtrack” to the representations of Chicano/Latino men that undermine a monolithic representation of these men. Machos y Malinchistas, thus, contributes to a process of decolonization for Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in re-examining the role of cultural nationalism in social and political movements like the Chicano movement generally in relation to Chicana/o Latina/o literature, film and music. In the end, I maintain that nationalism can be strategically deployed and invoked to effect political change but it must be reconfigured around different social relations that are inclusive, queerly imagined, and transcend the limits of a singular nationalist identity that ultimately reinforces white supremacy.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Navarro, José Alfredo (author)

Core Title Machos y malinchistas: Chicano/Latino gang narratives, masculinity, & affect

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 10/16/2013

Defense Date 08/27/2012

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

Tag affect,Chicana,Chicano,film,gang narratives,Latina,Latino,Literature,masculinity,OAI-PMH Harvest,rhythm,sexuality

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Lloyd, David C. (committee member), Vallejo, Jody Agius (committee member)

Creator Email jnavar17@calpoly.edu,jnavarro13@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-105072

Unique identifier UC11289462

Identifier usctheses-c3-105072 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-NavarroJos-1252.pdf

Dmrecord 105072

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Navarro, José Alfredo

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