Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 295 This novel begins with the latest misadventure of Silver Méndez, a Chicano poet with an obscure activist, marihuana-inhaling background. At the beginning of the novel, Silver is hit on the head with a typewriter and is knocked unconscious for an undetermined period of time. When he awakes, he has no idea of where he is or what he is supposed to be doing, whence the title. While the story is told in third person narration, the information given is limited to diat which is known or understood by the protagonist, an interesting strategy since the protagonist suffers from almost total memory loss. Through this technique the reader reconstructs Silver's past along with him. Through his encounters with students and colleagues, he discovers that he is in his temporary office at a Baptist college in the Simi Valley of southern California, substituting an English professor who is on sabbatical. Apparently, his acquired fame as a Chicano poet qualifies him to teach creative writing to English students. He, in spite of his amnesia, shortly discovers that he is having an affair with the Baptist wife of the college president, Laura, a relationship that he does not enjoy, feels is degrading and finally pawns off on one of his friends symbolically named Salvador , who has also converted to Christianity. During his attempts to remember, he also helps his widowed landlady at the Reagan Museum , a sacrosanct republican space, during an event in which he believes that he will soon be arrested due to his appearance and his past as a revolutionary Chicano poet. This fear runs rampant throughout the novel, even though it never comes to pass. While in the process of recovery, he becomes involved in a drug deal gone bad when he discovers that Petersen, the English professor that he is replacing, actually left to participate in a drug deal, which he is unable to complete, unfortunately for Silver, because Silver is the one who suffers the physical retribution and threats of the drug traffickers who Petersen has cheated. The novel ends with Silver's fleeing exodus due to threats from a local police officer, accompanied by Jason, grandson of the Baptist College founder, a rebellious student who wishes to explore something new, outside of his small, upperclass world, and believes that his road trip with Silver will somehow make him more aware on some profound level. Silver's goal, in contrast, is to make Jason into a Chicano, symbolized in his renaming as Ha-Són. Finally, Silver concludes that both Jason and he are true poets and that they can help each other. Structurally the novel is predominately chronological, although sprinkled with many scenes based on Silver's recollections. It is also interspersed with words in Spanish and other street slang, mainly in the sections of dialogue, and with jokes about Chicano lifestyles, dietary habits, and income levels. Political correctness within academia and society at large is portrayed satirically through Silver's inability to understand and participate in the academic community, which is, for its part, shown to be hypocritical and superficial. Julie Lirot University of Nevada, Las Vegas Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema University of Texas Press, 2002 Por David William Foster En 1992 publico Foster Contemporary Argentine Cinema y en 1999 Gender and Society in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema. A estos dos tÃ-tulos se une ahora este trabajo dedicado a la cinematograf Ã-a mexicana. Como se puede ver por los tÃ-tulos la aproximación epistemológica es diferente en cada volumen. Los que hayan seguido la trayectoria de su dilatada producción no se habr án sorprendido en absoluto, ya que la caracterÃ-stica principal de este autor es la de la búsqueda continua de qué puede ofrecer la crÃ-tica literaria y cultural para un mejor conocimiento de Ia cultura, especialmente la latinoamericana. En este libro se estudian catorce pelÃ-culas de las que daré una brev Ã-sima semblanza de lo que el crÃ-tico estudia en cada una de ellas para que el posible lecror pueda vislumbrar la complej a visión que va a adquirir tras leer el análisis de...