Stereotypes but: gender roles in contemporary Latin cinema. (Feature).

Hollywood does not portray Latinas or Latinos very often and when it does, it typically presents them in a predictable, and often unfavorable, light. The public is accustomed to seeing Latinas/os as barrio dwellers with little hope outside of lives of drugs and crime, or in subservient roles they cannot overcome. (1) Latina/o independent filmmakers are taking the issue of (re)presentation into their own hands, however, and the results have yielded innovative portraits of Latinas, in particular, who lead complex, multifaceted lives. These filmmakers are using a well-known representational strategy: stereotyping to explore gender roles, family expectations and assimilation.

The idea of representation in film is a complex one. As bell hooks so accurately and succinctly points out,

There are several theories of representation that can inform a discussion on film practices. (3) The most productive one is a "constructionist approach" (4) since it involves the production of meaning by looking at the connections among three different aspects of everyday life: the material world--people, places and events; the conceptual world, the mental images/pictures we have of those things; and the signs, arranged into systems of communication, that we use to refer to concepts. (5) Making meaning, therefore, is contingent upon the practice of interpretation, that is to say on our ability to understand and use a series of codes. As meanings change and become flexible, the codes of a culture also--although imperceptibly--change. "If meaning could be fixed by representation, then there would be no change--and so no counter-strategies or interventions." (6) But because meaning is slippery and can never be finally fixed, there is room for new representations or new ways of interpreting already known represe ntations, in this case of Latinas/os.

Two films in particular--Rum and Coke (2000) by Maria Escobedo and Luminarias (2000) by Jose Luis Valenzuela--express as well as develop scenes of social conflict and contradiction. Furthermore, these representational strategies can be conceived of as "constitutive" and are not merely reflective of everyday practices. Therefore, if we consider the perspective of the dominant society that Latinos are "welfare-ridden, AIDS-ridden, drug-ridden, dropout-ridden, teen-age-pregnancy-ridden," (7) we will see that the two films under consideration disrupt the perception of Latinas/os as social problems, because they present powerful, successful, professional Latinas. The narrative structures of the films, and the power structures represented in them, propose representations that interpellate both the real and the stereotypical.

Rum and Coke was written, directed and edited by Escobedo, a Cuban-American woman who lives and works in New York City. It is the story of Linda De Leon, a fiery, thriving television producer who lives by herself and is involved in an apparently perfect romantic relationship with Steve. In this relationship, she is considered on equal terms and her independence is respected. Linda struggles to reconcile the learned and assigned roles of the two cultures she has acquired through her life as a Latina living in the United States.

Luminarias was written by Evelina Fernandez, a Chicana living in Los Angeles, and directed by Valenzuela. It is the story of four upper-middle-class Chicanas in search of love and enduring relationships. Andrea is a lawyer who is divorcing her husband. Sofia is a therapist who thinks she likes "white men." Irene is a clothes designer with an appetite for young Latino men and a sex drive suppressed for the 40 days of the Catholic Lenten period. Lilly is a visual artist who is always falling for the wrong man. These four women confront the learned stereotypes of themselves and of others, as they try to define and create a space in which they can feel comfortable with the two cultures they straddle-Anglo and Latina.

The female characters in both films have to deal with stereotypes inside and outside of the family. Inside the family, they contend with assigned roles imposed by a traditional culture, where mothers and older female figures seem to be in charge of perpetuating the idea of women as self-sacrificing wives and mothers. Linda's case, in Rum and Coke, is perhaps the most evident. Her father abandoned the family when she was young, but her mother still reveres the image of the lost husband. Linda's mother and her aunt Rosa articulate the need for Linda to get married and have children, to which she responds that she has "a life and a career." To the threat that if she doesn't start the process of having children her "ovaries will shrink" and her "eggs will be hard," Linda responds that she does not need a man or babies to be a woman. Linda appears to be a liberated woman, with feminist ideals rooted in the United States. and in the twenty-first century, and the traditional beliefs represented by her Cuban mother and aunt seem not only antiquated but also absurdly constraining.

Linda meets Jose during a false fire alarm in her office. She refuses to leave the office and he carries her out. From that moment on, jose pursues Linda in spite of her reiterated refusals to go out with him. Jose is portrayed as the self-assured romantic "Latin lover" who knows how to treat women. He is a down-to-earth, honest, second generation Cuban, proud of his culture, but with a critical eye toward the older generation, the one who lives in the U.S. "on borrowed time." jose is the new/old representation of the Latino on the screen. He embodies the sensitive macho man, an apparently oxymoronic concept, but one that best describes the amalgamation of traditional attitudes toward women and love, with a new-found sense of respect and appreciation for independent women. Jose functions as the catalyst for Linda's transformation; through him, or because of him, she reacquaints herself with her roots and her latinidad, and learns how to accept passion and love in her life.

The scripts of both movies address the creation and disruption of fixed, immobile categories that can no longer explain the complexities of becoming and being a subject marked by gender, class and race. The female characters in both films call into question the idea of passion. Irene in Luminarias seems to be the incarnation of sexual passion on screen. Whenever we see her, she is wearing stylish, provocative clothes, from bustiers to shorts, to crucifixes and big, exotic earrings. She is the epitome of what sexual passion is supposed to signify. But she is also a highly devoted Catholic with another passion--religion. She adores "La Virgen de Guadalupe" and decides to abstain from sex as a penance/offering to the Virgin during the period of Lent. Irene is a curious example of a representational practice that reproduces two contradictory stereotypes in the same subject. Because of this duality/ambivalence, passion--which for Latinas seems to be stereotypically equated only to sexuality--acquires a new meanin g. Controlled passion, another apparently oxymoronic concept, serves to represent the possibility of a traditional religious life with the inexorable appetite for the passions of the flesh. The issue of Irene's abstinence and her devotion to the Virgin also has a humorous component, intended to demystify the seriousness of some Catholic rituals and to bring them into contemporary life, even in their old-fashioned way. Irene struggles with two powerful passions: sex and religion.

Spirituality and religion also play a compelling role in Rum and Coke. In a scene where Linda is trying on a wedding gown her mother is sewing for a customer, the audience can see a mantlepiece altar and an image of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, who is invoked for protection. In Linda's family there is more than traditional Catholic belief. True to the Cuban culture she represents, there is tia Rosa who is well versed in Santeria and spiritual cleansings. Linda's relationship to religion evolves during the movie. In the wedding dress scene, she is skeptical, and almost refuses to believe that there is protection coming from a Catholic icon. But by the end of the film, when everything in her life seems to be falling apart (she has quit her job because she can't compromise any longer, she is torn between Steve and jose), her first reaction is to go to tia Rosa for a cleansing, to pray to Santa Barbara to dispel the evil spirits. The re-affirmation of traditional cultural values operates to stabilize the s ituation and to give a sense of security and belonging. Linda goes back to family, to tradition, to religion and finds a path that may eventually lead her to happiness.

The representation of traditional cultural values as belonging to the older generation generates a discourse where the old and the new can coexist in the U.S., but not without conflict. The tension arises when one set of cultural beliefs seems to exclude or deny the other. In Linda's case, to be independent and respected inside a romantic relationship doesn't mean that the relationship has to lack passion, although in the case of her involvement with Steve that is precisely what happens. Conversely, to be in a relationship with a passionate and self-assured Latino doesn't imply subservience to the dominant macho. Passion seems to be repressed in Linda, who prefers control to stirred emotions, and who thinks that being ruled by passion goes against everything she stands for. Linda struggles between non-passion as stability and security (the Anglo world in which she needs to live) and passion as a risk (the Latino world she knows and fears).

Along with the Latina characters, the Anglo male character can be viewed as a catalyst that moves the action forward; the cause of emotional, political and ideological movement. He simultaneously represents a disturbance and a balance. In considering the role of the Anglo, we need to take into account the stereotypes that Latinas create and recreate about Anglos in general and the specificity of the relationship with a particular individual. In the representation of the Anglo character, both movies make a statement about Latinas as agents that perpetuate stereotypes. In doing so, they articulate the need for self-awareness, and they advance the notion of examining what is behind this representational practice. In Aztlan, L. S. Kim indicates:

Since representations are mediations--visually, culturally, and discursively--they displace elements of the real world and social relations. To mediate also means to mitigate, to deflect a potential surge of violence, in some ways, by absorbing it; thus representations are simultaneously a displacement of violence but also a deflected enactment of it. (8)

Steve, the Anglo male character in Rum and Coke, is a reliable, safe, predictable boyfriend for Linda. A talented photographer who moves in with her at the beginning of the film, he is portrayed as work-obsessed and unromantic. When he gets an assignment to travel to Peru for three months, Linda is opposed to the idea. However, he reminds her that they had both agreed that "work comes first, that's the way we want it." He comes back sooner than expected and proposes to her. When Linda tells him that they can be friends, but not a couple, his response is "I can live with that," and he prepares to move out. Steve is the stereotype of a cold, detached, efficient, reliable Anglo boyfriend, who does not show emotions even when being dumped. A relationship with him is safe, it is mature, and as Linda says, the lack of romance is "a small price to pay for independence." Steve functions as the stabilizing force in Linda's life, but only until she starts to accept who she is: a Latina.

Andrea, the main character in Luminarias, first meets Joseph in court while defending Cindy, a young Chicana immersed in a custody battle with an abusive husband. Joseph, of course, cannot pronounce her last name. Their second encounter is at a bar and is arranged by Sofia, in an attempt to dispel Andrea's sadness over her divorce. When Joe, her divorcing husband, and his new love interest arrive at the bar, Andrea asks Joseph to pretend they are involved in a romantic relationship. The evening concludes in Andrea's bedroom, after several drinks, with a surprised Andrea who used to think that "white men" cannot have a normal erection, because only Latinos are great lovers. All the stereotypes that Andrea has internalized about white males, as well as her position as a Chicana within the U.S., surface after that first sexual encounter with Joseph. In a scene the next day in her office, all four women--Andrea, Sofia, Irene and Lily--confront each other and their stereotypes. The scene is a declaration of culpab ility and a denunciation of victimization from the Chicano community toward its own members and toward the Anglo majority. For Andrea, Joseph is the embodiment of a stereotype she needs to unlearn in order to "get rid of the chip on her shoulder." For Irene, everybody is suspect except Latinos. For Sofia, Pablo, a waiter, represents old country Mexico, almost too tacky to consider, and certainly embarrassing to be associated with. Lily always seems to be hurt by everybody's prejudices, and is marked by barrio and family history. To the accusation by Sofia that Andrea is a racist, and that she engages in "white bashing," Andrea responds that she is not a racist but a victim of racism. But Andrea goes so far as to accuse Sofia of only liking white males, and of denying her origins because she lives west of La Cienaga, where it is implied true Chicanos live.

From this candid discussion among friends, we can deduce that to reverse a stereotype is not necessarily to overturn or subvert it. Nor does being both the subject and the object of stereotypes justify Andrea's assessment of the situation. Reversing the stereotype does not eliminate the contradictions of the binary structure of racial representation, and it does nothing to unmask the complex dialectics of power and subordination inherent in the structure of the movies. It seems that in the end the Anglo role supports both confusion and compromise. Both films can be considered liberal tales of women's self-realization. But they can also be thought of as narratives that hold women and men in intermediate (indeterminate) positions that oscillate between independence and emotional dependence on the opposite sex.

The point that comes across to the audience in the discussion/argument among the four friends and later in their pursuit of relationships is that "there is the polarized opposition between racial purity on the one hand and the pollution which comes from intermarriage, racial hybridity and interbreeding." (9) This idea of purity and contamination is reinforced by the visual, since there is an unavoidable connection between visual discourse and the production of (racialized) knowledge. The body itself is the visible site of differences that we cannot deny and it provides incontrovertible evidence for a naturalization of racial difference. Through the representation of the body, difference becomes the discursive site on which our knowledge of the others is created and disseminated. The people embodied in a certain body are then reduced to the signifiers of their physical difference. Says Stuart Hall,

Difference is ambivalent. It can be both positive and negative. It is both necessary for the production of meaning, the formation of language and culture, the social identities and a subjective sense of the self as a sexed subject--and at the same time, it is threatening, a site of danger, of negative feelings, of splitting, hostility and aggression towards the "Other. (10)"

The family party scene in Luminarias, in which Joseph is introduced to some of Andrea's relatives, is a case in point. One of the relatives is a dark-skinned Chicano-looking male named Jesus with a goatee, dark sunglasses, a ponytail and a guayabera. The other is a light-skinned male, Frank, with salt-and-pepper hair and casual but professional-looking clothes. Joseph learns that one of them is a UCLA professor and the other is a drug dealer, and of course he assumes that the dark-skinned one is the drug-dealer, while the opposite is actually the case. Once more, the audience is led to rethink the stereotype and to think about the body as the marker of difference, but also to unlearn the meaning assigned to a specific kind of body or image.

Regardless of the decodification of issues represented in the films, in a way Rum and Coke and Luminarias articulate some of the ideals for belonging to contemporary Jatinidad. The requisites always involve compromise, straddling, being here and there, some of the Anglo and some of the Latino culture, old world traditions and new ways of thinking about them.

Luminarias vividly exposes Latinas as both agents and subjects of stereotypes. Sofia, the therapist, confesses to having tried to "fit in with white people" and in the process she has forgotten who she really is. As with Linda in Rum and Coke, Sofia's forgotten roots, Jatinidad, and culture are brought back by the encounter with the "authentic" Latino, in this case a Mexican waiter, Pablo. In Rum and Coke, on the other hand, there is a double logic that implies "both" and "or." That is to say, Linda is in and out of both cultures, believing in old-world traditions and embracing the new ideals of a liberated woman. At the same time, she is forced to choose either to be a like Latina or like an Anglo. Ultimately, this double logic exercises discursive and ideological openness, because it ends up articulating the possibility of two messages: old-fashioned romance (and spiritual cure of the kind tia a Rosa can perform for Linda) can rescue a Latina who has lost her passion and can make her feel and behave like a true Latina again, fulfilling her traditional role. But the film can also be read as a story where romance and independence coexist.

The still prevalent model of a division between domestic space belonging to women and a public space dominated by men seems to be challenged and disrupted in both movies, since the female characters all have careers and activities outside of the realm of the house. (11) In the end they are all longing for a private space where they belong, a private space that is defined by them and not by the rules of gender roles. In the presentation of powerful and passionate Latinas, there is a need for developing female protagonists who meet the representational needs of women (Latina) viewers. If the characters are domesticated, if they never act impulsively and if they are almost sexless and sterile, then they represent no threat to the system. They are the perfect dream for a crossover Anglo audience only willing to have palatable Latinas on screen. To a certain extent, Linda can fit this description. The characters in Luminarias, on the other hand, have the possibility of being more dangerous, since they speak with a nger and resentment about oppression and stereotypes.

The new Latina that these movies represent and interpellate has, in fact, existed for quite a while, but unfortunately not in film. It is important for mainstream readers and moviegoers to be exposed to a representation (presentation) beyond the narrow stereotypes they typically encounter. For Latina/o audiences, the time has finally come when they see more varied, complex characters from a cross-section of Latina/o life in the U.S. Because both films so evidently engage in recreation of stereotypical Latino and Anglo characters, they might actually provoke the viewer to examine the complexities involved in the representational models of such characters. To the extent that this is true, the movies can be perceived as counter-strategy to the dominant discourse on Latinos, and that is for the best. But, as with all issues that involve representational practices and a displacement of the negative, there can be no absolute guarantee that the films will in fact contest the dominant perception of Latinas/os in the U.S. These two films do succeed in countering narrow stereotypes, and we therefore have two more opportunities to have preconceptions disproved and to see the fine variety of Latina/o characters and all they represent.

NOTES

(1.) For an analysis of Latinos as "coded images for politics" see Chon Noriega's "Internal Others: Hollywood Narratives 'about' Mexican Americans" in John King, Ana M. Lopez and Manuel Alvarado, eds., Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas (London: British Film Institute, 1993). See also L. S. Kim's article "Invisible and Undocumented: The Latina Maid on Network Television" in Aztlan Vol. 24, no.1 (1999), pp. 107-128.

(2.) bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996).

(3.) For a detailed analysis of theories of representation and meaning see Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, 2000).

(4.) Ibid.

(5.) Of course when we talk about systems of communication we refer to language, but since we are looking at film, we are also looking at the image; the visual component in film is another communication system. (Rather than looking at language or images as discrete communication systems, it is more productive to talk about the filmic discourse as a system of representation.)

(6.) Hall, p. 62.

(7.) Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of Representation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 14.

(8.) Kim, ibid.

(9.) Hall, p. 243.

(10.) Hall, p. 238.

(11.) Rosa Linda Fregoso, "Homegirls, Cholas, and Pachucas in Cinema: Taking Over the Public Sphere" in California History, Volume 74, no. 3(1995), pp. 317-327.

VIVIANA RANGIL is Associate Professor of Spanish at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, NY. Her teaching and research interests include Latin American and Latina filmmaking and literature, on which she has published journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a book on cooking, gender and economics.