Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety by Ignacio López-Calvo (review)

Ignacio López-Calvo offers a much needed study on the representations of Chicanos and Latinos in Los Angeles to combat what he terms their "invisibility." The book addresses a multiplicity of cultural texts, primarily focusing on narrative fiction and film, but including photographic images taken in and around the greater Los Angeles area to illustrate his points about Spanish, Mexican and indigenous cultural heritage woven into the fabric of the city. This text acts as a vindication of a seemingly "culture-less" (or mono-cultural) LA, imbuing the cityscape with textual layers of complex and often contradictory images and imaginings. At the same time that López-Calvo reclaims LA as a center for cultural production that runs counter to the hegemony of Hollywood superficiality, he explores the ways in which racial and class anxieties are expressed through literary and filmic texts by Chican@s/Latin@s, as well as by Euro-Americans who are at times sympathetic and at times ignorant to the lived experiences of those living in the barrio, or Chicano LA, which is increasingly decentralized.

The major thrust of this work is to examine the ways in which Chicanos/Latinos have historically existed in the time/space (chronotope) of Los Angeles, as well as the ways in which their presence has been documented and represented through literature and film. It focuses on such topoi as environmental and structural racism as experienced by those living on the East side: places like Chávez Ravine and Echo Park (among others), gang violence and the subjugation of women in that setting, police repression and the simultaneous search for belonging and disenfranchisement from the national project and finally, the de-barrioization of Los Angeles, and the anxieties around surges of immigration from Central America and the subsequent re-distribution of the population.

Though referring back to certain "foundational texts" on the Mexican experience in Los Angeles such as Daniel Venegas' The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breast-Feed (1929), or the chapter describing "pachucos" by Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), and early texts by John Rechy, Alejandro Morales and Luis Valdez, the study primarily observes cultural production from the late 1980s to the present that often reflects the recent "resurgence of bigotry and nativist hysteria" (9).

Chapter 1, "Environmental Racism and the Politics of Nature" addresses questions of white flight and suburbia as a "safe haven," the hidden costs of "urban renewal" for the ghettoized poor, eco-criticism and the use of science fiction to address anxieties about the crossing of both invisible and visible borders. As an example, he juxtaposes the privileged suburban Disneyland utopia of Chilean-born Alberto Fuguet's The Movies of My Life with the lived violence of a homeless Guatemalan refugee in Antonio Héctor Tobár's The Tattooed Soldier.

Chapter 2, "The Marginalization of Latino Urban Youth" examines the glamorization of gang violence, and the ways in which the "barrio" acts as an alternative "nation" for many of its inhabitants. The institutions of gangs, public schools and the LAPD are highlighted and critiqued, as in the double-oppression of women in the barrio. There is particular focus on films that offer alternatives to the over-representation of Chicanos as members of gangs.

Chapter 3, "Gendered and Nationalistic Anxieties" discusses and frames feminist critiques of Chicano culture by Chicanas (like Mona Ruiz, Yxta Maya Murray, Helena María Viramontes and Graciela Limón) and "Euro-Americans" (such as Kate Braverman and Allison Anders). If furher interrogates queer Chicano identity in Michael Nava and John Rechy's works, and the connection between Zapatismo and Chicanismo and lesbianism in the work of Limón.

Citing recent anthologies by David Fine and David L. Ulin that treat the "imaging" of Los Angeles, this works seeks "to address the exclusion and erasure of Latinas and...