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  • Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety
  • Joy Landeira
López-Calvo, Ignacio . Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2011. Pp. 239. ISBN 978-0-8165-2926-1.

True to his subtitle, Ignacio López-Calvo develops the overarching theme of social anxiety in literature and film located in and around Los Angeles, California. For the many AATSP members who have already begun to include the Hispanic United States as a component in Bilingual and Multicultural Studies programs, or who wish to do so, Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction helps us expand our horizons by identifying key texts that graphically portray life and death in the largest urban concentration of Hispanic origin people in the United States, now the second largest Latino-populated city worldwide. For educators who have not yet considered the wealth of Latino literature and culture originating "north-of-the-border," López-Calvo's thorough study encourages and inspires us to explore these new research and curricular frontiers.

The broad concept of "social anxiety" is subdivided into three focus areas: environmental racism and the politics of nature; marginalization of Latino youth; and gendered and nationalistic identities. Perhaps one of the sections that AATSP members, especially high school teachers, will be most interested in—and troubled by—is literature that reflects the marginalization of Latino youth. Here, in the same vein as novels such as Alejandro Morales's Barrio on the Edge (1975), we find one of the most archetypical movies, Ramón Menéndez's Stand and Deliver [End Page 755] (1988), starring Edward James Olmos, which itself delivers a most hopeful message of education as the way out of the barrio; this message is reiterated in Patricia Cardoso's Real Women Have Curves (2002). Good students with an academic future, known as "schoolies," in Two Badges (1997), are left alone by gangs.

Interestingly, both fictional films and journalistic documentaries are included in the "film" genre, allowing us to see the flip side of the story—a series of gang portrayals that create social anxiety at the same time they chronicle it. Fully twenty-five percent of the United States's gang population lives in Los Angeles. Gang culture ideates its own rules of citizenship, patriotism and morals, thereby engendering and empowering its own counter-nation. Novels such as Don't Spit on My Corner, films including Colors and Gang Warz, and documentaries about street and prison gangs like the History Channel's Gangland series do not posit hopefulness for overcoming the disenfranchisement of inner city or suburban youth. Journalists and law enforcement brotherhoods define hegemonic mainstream culture, fomenting and promoting alienation rather than discussion in works that López-Calvo terms "spectacularization" and that Rosa-Linda Fregoso calls "gangxploitation," such as Christ T. McIntyre's Gang Warz (2004).

The tension and confrontation between inspiring film and dark-side documentary cries out for understanding and balance, providing a perfect impetus for classroom dialogue and debate. There are no facile solutions. Thus, López-Calvo's study serves as a springboard for examining provocative topics that many readers prefer to shy away from. It certainly makes us aware that cultural studies should teach more than piñatas, quinceañeras, and eating tamales and flan. However, lest we are overwhelmed and overcome by the social anxiety caused by the fear of gangs, it is essential to remind ourselves at every turn that while there is Latino gang activity in Los Angeles, not all gang members, or even the majority of them, are Latino. Centered in Los Angeles, the film industry itself—from its earliest Hollywood roots to films like Cleopatra to its yearly Oscar hoopla—specializes in spectacles and "spectacularization"; this volume urges us to don spectacles of another sort, not rose-colored glasses, but to view issues through the well-researched lens of humanities and social sciences.

Additional resource materials include chronological lists of literary/testimonial works and of films/documentaries mentioned in the study that are well-worth considering when developing syllabi for teaching about Latino Los Angeles in graduate level seminars or as...

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