Latino Images in Film. Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance (review)

306 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies desire is a central organizing principle. Thus, Christina Sharpe's provocative essay "Learning to Live without Black. Familia: CherrÃ-e Moragas Nationalist Articulations," provides not an unveiling of lesbian desire, but an argument that Moraga's elaboration of making (queer) familia from scratch is riddled with the policing ofracial borders, namely that between Raza and African Americans. Although I would argue that the specific evidence that Sharpe uses to back her claim is weak—the main piece of which is to oddly fault Moraga for suggesting that "the meanings that attach to her skin shift in relation to the women that she is with" (249)—die claim itself is compelling and disrupts the celebratory refrain of Moraga criticism . The innovative and culturally specific projects of La Fountain-Stokes and Shaqse are representative of the rich and diverse new readings that comprise Tortilleras, a book that will no doubt provoke new conversations and new research in a number of fields. Sandra Soto The University of Arizona Latino Images in Film. Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance University of Texas Press, 2002 By Charles Ramirez Berg Ramirez Berg is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Associate Professor of Radio -Television-Film at the University of Texas, Austin, where he has taught and written about Latino film for over two decades. Along widi Chon Noriega, Ana López, David Maciel, Rosa Linda Fregosa, Carlos Cortés, and others, he is part of an important group of researchers who have placed the study of Latino media on the scholarly map. He has published a monograph on Mexican film and an impressive series of artides and book chapters on Latino media, especially Chicano film. While Ramirez Berg pays homage to these scholars citing in particular Noriegas editing of the first anthology of Chicano film criticism, ChÃ-canos and Film: Representation and Resistance (1992), and a second anthology with a broader focus, The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts ( 1996), edited by Noriega and López, he correctly differentiates Latino Images in Film from what these critics have previously published. His monographic study focuses on the very operation of stereotyping, how it functions in film in general and specifically in die depiction of Latinos in U.S. cinema including Hollywood productions as well films by Latinos themselves. Ramirez Berg approaches stereotyping from the perspective of the social sciences, particularly psychological and sociological research that has provided a way of connecting film criticism with what he identifies as "lived experience" (3). Although he does not reject the approaches of much of contemporary film criticism, he is critical that critics all too often ignore the social and historical contexts in which stereotyping can only be fully understood. Such an approach places him squarely wirhin the current of analyzing stereotypes within a larger conversation "that reveals the mainstream's attitudes about Others" (4). This discursive system has a long and ugly history in the United States manifested most dramatically in the Monroe Doctrine and its corollary of Manifest Destiny which was used as a justification by East Coast expansionists/imperialists to conquer Native American and Hispanic peoples during the nineteenth century. Its contemporary manifestation is the depiction of Latinos as lesser beings. In Part I, "Theory," Ramirez Berg reviews (in Chapter One) essential social science literature on stereotyping. Particularly valuable is his summary of eleven theses in psychological theory, the sociological perspectives, and feminist approaches to stereotyping. Chapter Two deals with stereotyping in film including: die semiotics of stereotyping ; the poetics of Hollywood stereotyping; stereotypes, minor characters, and die archetyped; and a very illuminating section in which the author offers some summary thoughts on a theory of stereotyping reception as a kind of triangulation. Chapter Three is a very dense bur most informative summary of the cultural and narrative dynamics of Hollywood cinema including die main currents of representation of Latinos (i.e., the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 307 Bandido, the Harlot, the Male Buffoon, the Female Clown, the Latin Lover, and Dark Lady), as well instances of resistance to these currents (e.g., some of John Huston's films). In Chapter Four, Ramirez Berg continues to explore different forms of resistance in the careers...