Crowding Out Latinos

8. The Lives of a Chicano Film Star: Anthony Quinn's The Original Sin

The Lives of a Chicano Film Star: Anthony Quinn's "lte Original Sin n 1995, the year he turned eighty, Anthony Quinn published One Man Tango, an account ofhis life among the movie stars he has known during his more than sixty years as a film star and theater actor. This second published story of Quinn's life covers his relationships with Hollywood movie stars more directly than his first autobiography, The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait (1972). Quinn's earlier book, however, ought to occupy an increasingly significant position in the history of Mexican American thought and American culture. Whereas Americo Paredes rendered the nature ofK-12 education for Mexican American students in the south Texas of the 1920s and 1930s, Anthony Quinn reveals the burden of being Mexican American in Los Angeles during the 1930s. Since that time, he has continued to make his difficult way through the film and acting industry. Although not specifically written as a work ofChicano literature , The Original Sin is one of the most engaging autobiographies yet published by a Mexican American who has achieved success in America.l Quinn's narrative, which is now out of print but ought to be reissued for its useful insights on growing up as a Chicano male, illuminates a ragsto -riches story that movingly dramatizes and provides considerable insight into a variety of assimilation problems also raised by Paredes's George Washington Gomez. Students in100 Copyrighted Material The lives of a Chicano Film Star 101 terested in learning how race, consciousness, and a Latino's personal self-image interact, and how all three of these factors are shaped both by the world in which Quinn grew up, as well as the on-and-off stage world ofthe cinema and media, cannot do better than to study the conflicts that The Original Sin underscores. Primarily motivated by the understandable desire to shape how posterity will see him, Quinn has at different times in his life paradoxically sought both to downplay and to highlight his Mexican American heritage . His objective clearly is to shed the best possible light on himself and his considerable acting talents. In his professional and personal hunger for life, love, attention, and what has to be seen as his own search for psychological balance, Quinn has consistently been shaped by his Mexican American ethnicity, as his life and two autobiographies demonstrate . The issues he raises, his narrative strategies, his intimate and quite public tabloid relationships, and the continual chaffing he experiences when his private and professional roles coalesce are so interconnected that it is difficult to envision another Mexican American narrative that successfully competes with Quinn's tumultuously adventuresome life. Despite the fact that Hollywood has not exactly clamored for Hispanic actors throughout the twentieth century, Anthony Quinn has achieved unimagined success for a Mexican American actor. Not that Quinn is especially known in America or anywhere else for his Latino or Mexican American roles. In fact, in his more than sixty years of acting in films and on the stage, Quinn has played an enormous variety of roles, most of which have masked his heritage and background. From his best-known Zorba the Greek (1964) to his many performances as an Italian, Hungarian, Russian, British, Spanish, and even Chinese actor, Quinn has very successfully not revealed that he is a Mexican American who grew up in California. It is not that Quinn has concealed his Mexican identity, but rather that the Hollywood reality is such that ifhe had identified or presented himself as a Mexican, Quinn would never have received leading man roles. Even then, among his numerous film credits are several lesser-known Mexican roles that he has portrayed in movies such as Viva Zapata! (1952), The Children ofSanchez (1978), and A Walk in the Clouds (1995). But because he is known by the surname of his Irish father, and because he has played so many different characters from so many parts ofthe world, few people know that Anthony Quinn, who lived in Italy for many years and now resides primarily in New Copyrighted Material 102 Chapter 8 York, is a Chicano who grew up in the barrios of Los Angeles in the 1930s. He is assumed by most film fans to be from some European country, but that impression belies the fact that he has had to playwhatever roles have been offered to him because Mexican Americans have never...