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| 129 6 All About My (Absent) Mother Young Latina Aspirations in Real Women Have Curves and Ugly Betty Deborah Paredez In the critically acclaimed coming-of-age film Real Women Have Curves (2002), Ana Garcia, a first-generation Chicana teenager from East Los Angeles, aspires to attend Columbia University but first must reckon with her mother’s traditional views about gender roles within the Mexican American family. Set in the summer months bridging high school graduation and the fall semester during which Ana was hoping to begin college, the film chronicles the mother-daughter conflicts that arise when Ana must fulfill her familial responsibility by working along with her mother at her sister’s garment factory. When Ana eventually leaves for college at summer’s end, her mother refuses to support her decision, remaining conspicuously absent from Ana’s despedida, or farewell scene, that marks the beginnings of Ana’s new life as an aspiring, independent woman. This narrative journey—in which the daughter’s fulfilled aspirations require the absence of the mother—is a strikingly familiar one, not simply for what many regard as its heart-wrenchingly realistic depiction of Latina mother-daughter acrimony, but also for its status as a recurring trope in popular representations of young female heroines. From Nancy Drew to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, absent or dead mothers frequently serve as key narrative features in tales of intrepid teenage girls who venture beyond the traditional feminine roles of the domestic realm to embrace adventure or embark on journeys of self-realization. Throughout these stories, as Ilana Nash and others have noted, the girl’s bond with her father (or a surrogate father figure ) ultimately serves as the relational path through which she attains and negotiates a sense of authority and selfhood in the public realm.1 Thus, in spite of—or perhaps precisely because of—the feminist impulses that guide these representations of female self-reliance, Naomi Scheman argues, “The message to a woman is clear: within the systems of male privilege neither 130 | Deborah Paredez her appropriately feminine sexual identity nor her ability to assume public power is compatible with her being her mother’s daughter.”2 While the absent mother trope in Real Women Have Curves aligns the film within these broader canons of female bildungsromans and action heroine tales, it also links the film to a trend within recent cinematic and televisual representations of Latinas. During the past decade, Latinas have emerged in popular culture as icons of posthumous worship, “It” girls of show business, and (sex) symbols for the emerging assertions and aspirations of all Latina/ os.3 And yet, despite the enduring popular fascination with the hypersexualized Latina body, recent representations have not entirely circumscribed Latinas within the frames of spicy, heavily accented otherness that marked Latina visibility in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s.4 In fact, as Jillian Báez observes, cinematic portrayals of Latinas in recent years have often depicted “Latinidades feministas—moments of female agency among and between Latinas.”5 But a disturbingly common narrative feature shared by these otherwise progressive depictions of Latinas is the absent or dead mother. Across a range of genres—from coming-of-age tales to epic family dramas to campy telenovelas—Latina mothers are frequently sidelined in the service of promoting (often unlikely and invariably Oedipal) father-daughter bonds, such as in Selena (1997) or Crash (2004), or are willfully disengaged from a young Latina’s emergence into womanhood, as in Real Women Have Curves. More commonly, the premise of many plotlines chronicling the Latina/o family conspicuously include a dead Latina mother, as in the films Girlfight (2000), Tortilla Soup (2001), Raising Victor Vargas (2002), and the television shows Resurrection Boulevard (Showtime 2000), American Family (PBS 2002), and Ugly Betty (ABC 2006). This pervasive trend provokes the guiding question of this chapter: why is it that in order to make young women cinematically legible as U.S. Latinas their mothers must be absent or dead? This chapter examines the absent mother trope in tales of young Latina aspiration depicted in Real Women Have Curves and Ugly Betty. Both works, released in the years since the much-touted “Latin Explosion” of the 1990s, are regularly regarded as affirming representations of young working-class Latinas. A critically and commercially successful independent film that secured wide distribution after winning awards at the Sundance Film Festival , Real Women is classified as a coming-of-age film, while Ugly Betty marks a new...

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