Review of "Entre Nos"

Start with the title: Entre nos. Between us. It is a popular expression in Latin American countries, and connotes not only intimacy and trust, but also a moment of discovery. It is the same as saying, this is what I really believe, I trust you enough to share it with you, no matter how shocking or embarrassing or disagreeable it may be.

It is the title, then, of a movie directed and co-written by Paula Mendoza, that details the story of a young Colombian immigrant mother, Mariana, and her two children, Gabriel and Andrea. They have arrived in an almost pastel version of New York in the summer, maybe sometime in the 80s, maybe later, to be reunited with the father. They live in a cramped apartment, but everything looks promising, especially the empanadas that Mariana is frying in the opening scene. It should be the beginning of a dream, should it not?

Well, it will be, but it will be a dream that is hard-fought. It is apparent that there is tension in this marriage, and the father will shortly after abandon his family, to flee who knows where, he says to Miami for a work assignment, but it could be anywhere. She is left alone with two children, with little to tide her over, drowning as she is in desperation and anguish and not wanting to recognize that she has been abandoned.

We have, then, the vulnerable mother who , in this biographical story, is left to fend for herself, in an unfamiliar place, with small children. While New York may look glowing in this depiction, without the grime and the predators that are also a part of its mystique, it is still not a particularly receptive place. Whether or not we can forgive the husband, we aren’t in a position to judge. The son Gabriel puts it best: she was always needy, and maybe, it was too much for them.

As they descend she finds strength in a sort of brutish need to protect her children. It would have been very easy to imagine her giving up if it hadn’t of been for Gabriel and Andrea, who view the whole experience as a bewildering affair. There are moments when they reach out, and some extend a helping hand (the owner of the food truck, the Indian woman who rents them a room, the African-American man who gives them encouragement as they struggle to survive), but others are content not to acknowledge them. They are emblematic of a homeless population that is invisible, in other words, that needs help, that needs to be acknowledged.

Summer is portrayed in a beautiful way in this film. It is scorchingly hot, of course, but the New York presented in this movie is an idealized version, a place of memories. Maybe that is part of the reason why the movie fails to tap into the true dramatic potential of this situation. We don’t really get a sense of danger, of peril, for it all seems dreamlike. Maybe that was the point. It was sudden, and they can’t quite believe it. Neither can we, and the only real conflict we have, that between mother and son, really fails to resonate, because it isn’t really sustained.

This is a situation that befalls many families. We see people lacking resources, having to scrounge as best they can, trying to resolve their own conflicts, their own timidity, their own sense of powerlessness. If it was meant to focus our attention on a social problem, it isn’t entirely convincing, mainly because of the dramatic shortfalls.  It does, however, tell the story of little endearments, of encounters that are redemptive, of items that are thrown away but are scavenged and converted into something useful.

It is also a wistful view of a time of difficulty. Between us, it wasn’t so bad, was it? Look what we learned about ourselves and about each other. Entre nos, it signaled the start of something new. An awakening.

The hyper-educated poor (link to article)

From first-hand experience, I couldn't agree more with this article. An excellent description of the state of affairs in Academia, and during the past few years I have found myself discouraging my students from even applying to PhD programs. My students don't listen, thinking they will be exalted by obtaining those advanced degrees, and they think they will have universities clamoring to hire them the way Silicon Valley companies hire engineers, but this is not the case. I made my share of mistakes, buying into the whole argument of the massive retirement of baby-boomers, and the opening up of positions, as well as the fact that universities would supposedly make a push to increase diversity, but this is only lip service. The baby boomers stay long past traditional retirement age, and diversity is only a watchword, not a reality. I didn't listen when I was told in the 1990s what my prospects would be. From the article: "In what appears to be a disturbing and shocking twist, pursuing the highest degree in your field can potentially mean earning less money than a high school graduate. Everyone assumes that following the course of increasing education will ultimately lead to higher incomes and better careers, but the plight of adjunct faculty demonstrate that this is not always the case."

Higher degrees and lower pay

The Beetle Emerges (Review of "The Midwife's Apprentice")

In an era in which much of children’s literature borrows liberally from the fantasy genre or from tired old formulas of teen melodrama, it is refreshing to come upon a novel that undertakes an engaging imaginative leap, setting its story in a historical epoch that is distant but also alluring and immediate. Such is the case with Karen Cushman, a novelist who undertakes serious research into the details of everyday life in different epochs, and who has been writing a collection of novels that can be categorized within this genre of historical fiction. She has gained much recognition in the process, and her novel The Midwife’s Apprentice was a winner of the Newberry Prize.

What constitutes a work of children’s literature? One thinks immediately of the presence of a child protagonist, in conjunction with a style and a diction that is sparse while also being accessible and immediate. One certainly thinks as well of an essential intimacy, one necessary to engage the reader who is not necessarily a child but who yearns for a simpler style of narration that depends on an immediacy of impression as well as on sensorial description. We find these elements frequently in children’s literature, and these combine with themes that have to do with exploring the place of the outsider, one looking for a new sense of belonging. These are narratives, then, that reflect an awakening on the part of the protagonist. They are combined with a sympathetic narrator who hovers over it all, weaving a protective spell.

This novel is set in medieval England, in a brief interlude that represents an idyllic moment of peace, far from the civil conflicts of the age. It details the story of Beetle, a young girl who is an orphan, not knowing who her parents were nor where she came from, adrift in the world and in desperate straits.  She is starving and cold in addition to being nameless, and is trying to find a way to reincorporate herself into society. As the novel begins she is found desperately trying to stay warm by taking refuge in a steaming pile of dung, half buried and content to disappear, if she weren’t rescued by Jane Sharp, an irascible, loud and domineering woman who happens to pass by the trash heap and offers her a lifeline.

This isn’t done willingly. Beetle has little sense of value, and can be considered as little more than a throwaway object.  Is she an insect, then? Of course she would be christened by that name, a term of scorn used by all the villagers, for she is unwanted, a beggar who is a nuisance to all. This feeling of being outcast is a familiar trope of children’s literature, and we see it over and over again, the mistreated child who suffers from the torments of bullies, mean teachers and absent or distant parents.

This is a genre, after all, which emphasizes the reincorporation of the outsider, in this case, the child. The novel will narrate the slow awakening of the protagonist, who is placed within a narrative framework that proceeds in stages to provide her with the elements she lacks: a name, a place, a trade, self-confidence and, ultimately, an identity.

Jane Sharp is one of the few women of this period who has a modicum of power. She is a midwife and loner, living without a family, a woman, self-confident and mean-spirited at times, able to take pride in her trade for she is needed by all. She is, thus, accorded a certain amount of grudging respect by all. She has the power to lessen the burden of child-bearing, and to save lives from time to time. She also happens to be a woman who is inquisitive as well as systematic, preserving a body of lore that is obtained in an almost scientific way. She is an amateur botanist as well as chemist, nurse, surgeon, psychologist and counselor, with a little of the con man in her as well. She also makes liberal use of the suggestion of witchcraft, an association that has the power to mystify and frighten the others. She must nonetheless tread carefully here, for of course this is a very superstitious time, and a witch is not only an emblem of malice and temptation that recalls the biblical role assigned to women, but also, one may say, a catchword for a woman who has transgressed too far in the exercise of power. In a patriarchal society, the witch as woman of power necessarily invites punishment.

Slowly, while being mistreated and exploited by the midwife, the child comes to learn the midwife’s craft. A process of apprenticeship is also a trope of children’s literature, and it helps to highlight the value of endurance, patience and one must say submission (for the outsider is always rebellious). These are, of course, bourgeois values, and one may be forgiven for asserting that this genre is one in which the protagonist is initiated into an economy of consumption. Everything is a product, after all, and without the fantasy elements of fairy tales, in which work and accumulation are a matter of spells and secret weapons are offered by helpers (fairy godmothers, magical animals, etc.), a key role that was of course described by Vladimir Propp in his seminal work on the semiotics of fairy tales, we have then the birth of the new consumer.

This is a time of heavy labor and widespread disease as well as warfare, with the pomp of a ruling class of kings and barons and knights amply celebrated in the literature and lore of that period. The rulers had, after all, accumulated both the social and material capital of the land, and the scribes wrote chronicles of their deeds, and not those of the everyman, the farmer, the merchant, the miller or the baker. However, curiously, the rulers are not present in this novel, and the only time we have any mention of them is when the protagonist, now christened with the name of Alyce, goes to the manor to visit another waif who she has taken under her wing and adopted as her “brother”, one she has christened with the name of Edward. Both of them, tellingly enough, appropriate their names in a form of aspirational fulfillment.

Alyce has her run-ins with the local bullys, one of which is a red-headed boy by the name of Will who would have drowned if not for her help. In other works this would have signaled a turning point, one in which the world would magically change and take on a rosier color, in which things would be settled in favor of the protagonist, and in a fairy tale the tormenter would naturally have met a grisly and deserved death, for so was justice conceptualized in the popular mind that is reflected in fairy tales. One has to give credit to Cushman for emphasizing that things are rarely so simple, making use of her authorial reflection to insert a remonstration that questions the notion of justice as a capital that is earned: “If the world were sweet and fair, Alyce (she must be called Alyce now) and Will would become friends and the village applaud her for her bravery, and the midwife be more generous with her cheese and onions. Since this is not so, and the world is just as it is and no more, nothing changed.” (p. 40) Nonetheless, the girl continues to learn the skills of the midwife, even though Jane Sharp doesn’t offer them freely and instead seems bent on hoarding her secrets. She wants to make sure that Alyce, who has yet to earn the role of apprentice, is kept in the dark. (What is she, then? The proletariat who should remain invisible and willing to accept their abuse? An ungrateful victim born to suffer? In any case, she is an intermediate creature, powerless but in the process of becoming a subject.)

She will have many adventures, accompanied most of the time by another orphaned creature that she has adopted, an orange cat named Purr. There will be episode that reveals the progress she is making as she takes on a more active role. There will be a week in which the Devil who comes to the town, ironically dispensing justice to those who most tormented the protagonist. (This Devil is an engaging and comical artifice, however.) And, she will help a struggling cow give birth to twin calves, something that would represent quite an achievement if it weren’t merely the prelude to a metaphorical fall that will present another lesson that must be learned.

The novel is told in a language that is beautiful in its plainness. It introduces a cast of characters who seem at times a little too romanticized, but then again, the object of this type of narrative is to convey the outlines of a transformation, in which the protagonist achieves a sense of self, and not to present a world that is lacking in meaning or is actively malevolent, degrading the protagonist. She will have to be incorporated into society as a productive (and thus valued) member. The orphan will need to find a family, where family means role and place and institutional incorporation, and this is an eternal need that is timeless precisely because it is paradigmatic. Set as it is in a different historical epoch, the novel nonetheless details in a deeply sympathetic way a process that is familiar to all of us, the awakening of the self. It would not be the place to complain if the novel failed to touch on more complex issues, such as an exhaustive exploration of the meaning of isolation, angst and anger.

Like Magister Reese, the solitary man who keeps house at the inn and who helps Alyce recover what she had lost, we strive desperately to reach through the book and help the protagonist, for we are emphatic readers and children’s literature awakens empathy. As the sole literate character, he is a sympathetic character, another outsider who watches and writes, forsaking the cloistered realms of Oxford college to stake himself in a humble inn, observing the lives of the wretched and the poor. He is rumored to be writing a “great and holy book” (p. 77). What could be more holy than a story of redemption?

Copyright 2015 (C) Oscar Romero

Chicano Unbound (Review of the film "Walkout")

Chicano Unbound

(Review of the film “Walkout”)

Questions of education access continue to impact the Latino community. In the face of discouraging indicators that include continued low test scores, high rates of truancy and academic desertion (in 2011 the Latino high school graduation rate was 67.7 percent, behind that of “Whites” at 83.4 percent and “Asians” at 89.4 percent) and low representation in university enrollment, there have been continued initiatives to try to combat these problems. There have been legal, financial and cultural proposals that have been considered, and they are part of an overall debate about the need for educational reform.

There has been legal recourse, as evident in the actions of the ACLU that, in conjunction with parents, has brought attention to the issue of inequitable school conditions, in particular, to the assertion that “high poverty” school in California are denying students sufficient “learning time”. (http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/05/29/316701934/aclu-sues-california-for-equal-learning-time) Politicians have also sought to address the situation of low performance school and advocated for “takeover” initiates to wrest control of schools from perceived ineffective school administrators and personnel. There has also been another avenue evident in the legislation such as that introduced by former state senator Gloria Romero, whose “Open Enrollment Act” of 2010 allows students to transfer out of lowest-performing schools, but has been little used to date. (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/parents-647074-school-districts.html)  And, in an era of burgeoning charter school enrollment, there has been other approaches, evident for example in the attempt to create a curriculum that more fully engages Latino students by accessing elements of their cultural background, such as is evident in the Semillas del Pueblo Charter school of Los Angeles. This particular school takes a position of cultural advocacy that promulgates notions of identity influenced by the Chicano movement of the 60s and 70s, and features bilingual instruction in Nahuatl and a community approach of empowerment and engagement that reveals the influence of cultural advocates such as the historian Rodolfo Acuña, who has pioneered a framework of oppositional identity that is evident  most notably in his work Occupied America. They had to fight to keep their doors open, but were ultimately successful. (http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2014/11/14/40329/how-an-el-sereno-charter-school-fought-for-and-won/)

Conditions have changed in the intermediate years ever since the landmark lawsuit of 1947, Méndez vs. Westminster School Board, once that preceded the famous case Board versus the Board of Education from 1954.  With regards to the former, which dealt with school segregation practiced against children of Mexican origin in California, a group of parents filed suit in the forties to challenge the decision not to allow their children to attend the local schools. The decision had to do with the assignation of racial identity, and the fact that one group of Mexican-origin children were lighter-skinned and looked more European, but their cousins, who were darker-skinned, were denied entry, and told they would have to attend a special school for Mexicans. The fathers of these family members filed suit, and on Feb. 18, 1946, the finding was made that segregated schools were an “unconstitutional denial of equal protection”.  The original conditions had formed part of cultural attitudes enshrined in a legal matrix that were geared to portraying those of Mexican background as unfit or unsuitable, and was evident in a pattern of exclusion that was illustrated in the case of the denial Timoteo Andrade’s petition to become a naturalized citizen based on his testimony that he was “a pure-blooded Mexican”, neither of the “original Aztec race in Mexico” nor of the Spanish “race” of Europe. (The presiding judge, T.S. Maxey, ultimately rules that he was eligible for citizenship, based not on reasons of racial classification, but on the clauses regarding collective naturalization in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.) Both cases illustrate a policy of exclusion that reflected ongoing racial conceptions inherited from the 19^th century.

The film Walkout (2006) chronicles the legacy of these ideas as embedded in cultural and institutional framework of this country. It focuses on a moment in the educational struggle of the Latino community, and on a period of political struggle. It is set in the year 1968, in the schools of East Los Angeles, and it dramatizes the situation of poor and working class students of primarily Mexican background who became aware of the educational inequities in their own schools. As dramatized in this film, these public high schools were considered mainly holding grounds for students who, in their vast majority, failed to obtain their diplomas. It highlights the journey of one student, Paula Crisostomo, of mixed Mexican-Filipino background, who comes into contact with Chicano ideology and its promulgation of a new identity.

Paula, played by Alexa Vega, is an above-average student who is about to graduate from Lincoln High School. She comes into contact with a high school teacher by the name of Sal Castro, played by Michael Peña, who has been energized by the new ideology of liberation that permeated the revolutionary culture of the 1960s. Mr. Castro seeks to question an official historical narrative that is maintains is based on an ideology of erasure and exclusion, negatively affecting minority groups and specifically those of Mexican ancestry. He tries to engage his students who seemed easily distracted or indifferent by their school experience, one that seems foreign to them, with teachers and administrators who by and large appear indifferent to questioning these norms. In fact, as their teacher prods them into accepting the need to rewrite history, many of his students openly scoff. The question, then, is who is ready to receive his message?

The school conditions that are dramatized in this film reflect a mentality that more closely parallels the prison guard dynamic. Students are punished for any use of Spanish, and are paddled in front of the class in humiliation fashion, as a form of intimidation. They are also subject to the assignment of janitorial duties as punishment, needled and abused in one notable sequence that leads to an escalation of tension and the inevitable backlash. They are also forced to tolerate racist comments from their teachers, in addition to low expectations wherein most of them are shunted into tracks that are vocational and vary rarely college-track. These conditions are dramatized in other ways that bring the crushing weight of these policies into dramatic focus, for they are treated as a suspect underclass, even denied access to bathrooms during lunch breaks while others schools are much more expansive and inclusive in outlook, a contrast that is elaborated in another sequence where the students are taking outside to see “how the other half lives”.

The charismatic teacher Sal Castro, a young and impassioned leader but also a careful strategist, is a figure barely tolerated by the establishment himself, a troublemaker who, it is said in the film, had been reassigned to Lincoln High School as a disciplinary action for having supposedly incited his students to political awareness at Belmont High School. He is portrayed as a rebel, a father figure and a friend, a tactician and a go-between who lives in both worlds, in those of power (he knows who to approach on the School Board as well as in the principal’s office) as well as who to reach out to among his students. He encourages them to question their conditions and at times comes across as a bit of a wise-ass as he challenges them to come to terms with what it means to identify themselves as Chicanos (an action that carries with it an inevitable political dimension). As Gregory Rodriguez has summed up, was impelled by the political consciousness of a select group: “The emerging Chicano Movement was in large part driven by an identity crisis. The sentiment that inspired many young politically conscious Mexican Americans was similar to that which had moved so many young whites and blacks to action in the 1960s: alienation.” (p. 204, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds)

This represented a big hurdle for many of them, and it was long been noted that the awareness and acceptance of group identity was a construct that was consciously formulated only in the latter half of the 20^th century. People of Mexican origin had long been held to be too fragmented by class, by culture, by region and by ideas of cultural affiliation, and their racial impurity, their notion of an essential mestizaje that contrasted with the absolute categories that prevailed among in American and Western ideologies. People of Mexican heritage were more comfortable identifying themselves as “Mexicanos”, and not as “White” (ethnic Europeans or Anglos Saxons) or “Blacks” or other headings or categories, something that has been noted by in responses to the US Census questionnaires, which typically demanded a clear-cut racial label. This was evident in the very terms that they used to describe themselves, with some opting for Mexican-American, others for Hispanic, others for the term Mexican, for Spanish-American, and still others for Latino, American, or in a supremely individualistic notion, the personal pronoun that insisted that they were all just individuals (just another “I”).

The term “Chicano” has long been in use in the community, but it had been pejorative, and had a class association that precluded its identification with social or class progress. It was reserved for those who were lower class, a group to whom were attributed all manner of social pathologies, and thus, not a term in which they could feel pride. It was a subsequent generation of educated and politically conscious Mexican Americans who would rescue the term and apply it to an ideology that was collective and redemptive, ushering in a political movement in the 1960s that drew inspiration from other movements of colonial liberation. In the United States the term was used by organizer Rodolfo “Corky” González, who in 1969 used it to christen a new movement. This moment of awakening is dramatized in a lyrical passage in the film, where the students gather together and listen with rapt attention, then perform a sort of line dance (a dance of collective union) at a student youth conference held by the California coast (a location that is both idyllic as well as redemptive, in that it suggests a sort of baptism) and that was preceded by a Chicano homily, the recital Corky Gonzalez’s seminal poem “I am Joaquín”.

The fact is that the students begin to see that they are living under conditions that are unequal and oppressive, forcing them to recognize that they share a common bond. Even Paulina, whose father refers to her derisively as a “Chilipina” (Chicana-Filipina), and who had seemed destined to escape the fate of her friends who chose weren’t as studious as she was and who had been told by their counselors that they should aspire to be secretaries or skilled labor, not educated professionals, has what one may term her own awakening. (In many ways one can see as a product of guilt, something she feels as she nears graduation and contemplates having to leave behind her friends who won’t be joining her in college, as well as the difficulties and divisions in her own family, as she contemplates leaving behind her suffering Chicana mother, played by Laura Harring, who fits the mold of a passive and sufriente “Guadalupe” that is at the heart of Mexican matriarolarchy, the cult of the suffering Virgin Mother). Paulina is in search, then, for a family that she can redeem, if not her own, then another one which is cohesive and inspiring in a way that her own family is not, engaged in a cause, not resigned to perpetual suffering.

She finds this family in a group of activist Chicanos (may we call them her fellow apostles, with the teacher Sal Castro cast in the role of Jesus?), and they begin to formulate a list of demands. They want changes in their school, are at a loss as to how to begin. Should they have faith in the system? Can they use peaceful means, or will they be forced to consider the other approach, the one advocated by a group of Brown Berets that represent the other side of the pendulum, the fighters who have taken to heart the revolutionary methods of Che Guevara and insurgent movements in the rest of the world and are inspired by the forceful tactics and ideology of the Black Panthers? Will it come to that, a revolutionary struggle, or can they carry out their revolution in the classrooms using the means at their disposal, writing articles, presenting petitions, trying to awaken a passive community? There is the fear that they could be termed subversive and persecuted, the way the Black Panthers were, for that group fed the anxieties of a middle-class America trying to come to terms with what for them was a troubling Civil Rights movement that was the natural outcome of a troubled and violent legacy that had been contained (although it was still violent and degrading, as witnessed by the effects of the Jim Crow apparatus in the south or the systematic suppression of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest). The outlaw (or freedom fighter) has ever become the martyr, as evident even then in the immediate temporal period of the film, with the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968. Perhaps it was the foreshadowing of another Watts riot to come, conditions that we may say persist even now, with the fear and anxiety on the part of mainstream America that accompanied the unrest provoked in Ferguson, Missouri and in New York City with the killings of unarmed black men.

There is a progressive dynamic of frustrated engagement that leads to new actions, as the engaged Chicanos try to present their demands but are ignored or dismissed. Conditions come to a boil, and the students are forced to consider an extreme tactic: a walkout. The dramatic tension is portrayed in effective fashion, but one must say, in a fairly condensed and straightforward way that somehow one imagines doesn’t capture the messiness of the moment, but is an artistic license. There are internal debates by the student organizers, and worries they express that scenarios that seem very real for us even now, with questions such as: What if we stage a revolution, and no one joins in? Will the only recourse be to armed struggle and not discourse? What will it take to engage the rest of the students, so that they finally break through the wall of apathy and fear that are part and parcel of the perception of powerlessness, and try to fight the power that seems so monolithic, so entrenched, so intimidating (the LAPD sends swarms of police officers to surround the schools, and the students are threatened repeatedly with arrest and expulsion) so pervasive and, ultimately, so ordinary? (There are unresolved power dynamics at play even in Paulina’s family, for her father is an angry and intimidating figure in his own right who not only rails against agitators, but who doesn’t believe in questioning power, affirming in a boxing analogy that whoever steps into the ring can expect a pounding. This as he scowls and berates his wife and daughter, the mirror image of what the police do with the student protestors or the administrators do when the disdain their students.)

There are other forces undermining them as well. There is the fact that they know that they have an informant among their group, someone who has been feeding information to the police, for they become aware that not only are the dates of their planned walkout actions known in advance by them, but also the schools that have been enlisted to participate.  The activists know that they are being surveilled, with police cars openly stationed around their hangouts and harassment of their leaders as they attend their meetings, as well as photos being taken of them in plain view. Who is the informant, and will this drive them apart in mutual suspicion? In the end, they are left to reclaim a spirit of cohesion in service to an ideology of peaceful resistance, trying to change the mentality not only of their own fellow students but also of a city that seems to be riven by its own fears, in this tumultuous decade.

The protests come to a boil, in the tension-filled second half of the film that reveals how the process of intimidation and suppression serve to challenge their faith in the process. Throughout it all they have the steadying presence of teacher Sal Castro, who faces his own dangers and who comes across as an immensely appealing and redemptive figure, an everyday revolutionary who doesn’t seek the limelight and who, towards the end, after having been arrested and imprisoned (their Judas is revealed in this sequence) leaves the jail after having posted bail, resurrected as it were, and elevating him to the status of Chicano icon. (The real Sal Castro passed away in 2013.)

The film presents, then, a narrative of personal as well as collective awakening on the part of a community that sought to makes its presence felt and overcome a cycle of powerlessness. It is structured as a redemptive drama (I have highlighted the biblical parallels), presenting as it were a struggle that was waged in the face of long odds, for even when the student protestors face the prospect of utter defeat, with their leaders arrested and charged with serious felonies, and the movement seemingly having been frustrated by the machinery of power, they find strength in the recognition of having achieved a collective identity. There is also the element of personal redemption introduced as well, although this bit comes across as a little cloying in its sentimentality, in the way in which mother and daughter are united and the mother is redeemed by taking pride and supporting her daughter. It is maybe a little saccharine, and as with the dialogue that seems a little too polished and literary (the screenplay was written, after all, by Victor Villaseñor), and the impossibly noble student activists who don’t show any failings and who are thus almost one-dimensional, this strikes one as being a heavily idealized treatment of this historical episode. Perhaps this was necessary to appeal to a wider audience, although we are aware that there is a fair bit of mythologizing taking place, and that Hollywood imposes its own structures, those that include the proverbial happy ending. (We are reminded of the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, that is set just ten years after the event depicted in this film, and which seem to indicate that conditions didn’t change, schools were continuing to fail their students in the East LA region and it was up to another redemptive figure, the depoliticized master motivator Jaime Escalante, to rescue his students.)

As Paulina exclaims towards the end, while it may appear that the movement was doomed to failure, in reality it has already won, for it ushered in a process of community awakening, with the coming to power of a whole generation of Chicano politicians (although they didn’t always prefer to use that label, bidding as they did to appeal to a wider electorate; such was the case with Antonio Villaraigosa, the recent mayor of Los Angeles). The truth is all around her, as storyboarded in the film. She is at the county jail, but she is surrounded by her peers and by members of the community, everyone has come together in a cross-generational reunion, to celebrate the collective “we” of a Chicano community that has awoken and finally broken aside the barriers that were placed in its way.

Up to now, the movie prominently featured images of keys and chains and fences and locks (remember the school bathrooms that weren’t available to Chicano students during lunch time, or the way Paulina has to sneak into her house after each meeting because she can’t go through the front door late at night, or the students jumping over the chain link fences that surround their schools?), and what is evident is that this metaphor of constraint segue ways one of liberation.

This film presents the narrative of the Chicano unbound.

 Copyright 2015 (C) Oscar G. Romero