Taking Stock: Recent and Emerging Lines of Study in U.S.–Latina/o Cinema

The release of such films as Spare Parts (2014) and Book of Life (2015) ostensibly suggest a recent mainstreaming of Latina/o cinema. Yet, the production of both commercial and independent Latina/o movies, the growing but still sparse number of Latina/o directors and actors, and the complexities of Latina/o audiences and Latina/o content together make an examination of Latina/o cinema all the more necessary. In what appears an obligatory ritual, book-length studies of Latina/o cinema often commence by addressing the question: What is Latina/o about a particular corpus of films? In his monograph, The Promotion and Distribution of U.S. Latino Films, Henry Puente defines a Latina/o film by using an abbreviated index of criteria: the actors speak in English and/or Spanish, and/or the leading actors, director, scriptwriter, and/or producer possesses “name recognition within the Latino community” (3–4). What Puente calls a “hybrid” Latina/o film, by contrast, includes some of those same criteria, yet has the following distinction: the film casts a non-Latina/o actor either in a Latina/o role or as the romantic counterpart to a Latina/o character so the film will appeal to multiple U.S. niche markets (4). In Latino Images in Film, Charles Ramírez Berg locates a problematic latinidad in the stereotypes of Latinas/os in Hollywood cinema and examines how Hollywood has often elided distinctions among U.S. Latinas/os and Latin Americans (5). Finally, in their introduction to the collection The Ethnic Eye, Chon Noriega and Ana López expand the possibilities of what Latina/o cinema can be by including a plurality of Latina/o filmic expressions and different formats of moving images (commercial films, independent cinema, experimental shorts, video). Though The Ethnic Eye focuses on the cinematic expressions of the traditional Latina/o trifecta (Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American), Noriega and López describe their own “critical strategy” as emulating Latina/o cinema, and one which I invoke here to describe the current state of Latina/o cinema—“refusing fixity, essences, secure locations, [and] singular affiliations” (xx).

Characterizing Latina/o cinema can also entail locating kindred critical enterprises or corpora of cinema. For example, criticism of Latina/o cinema can appear alongside analyses on other minoritized subjects within mainstream U.S. cinema, such as feminist, queer, African American, Native American, and/or Asian American cinemas.¹ The vogue of transnational cinema tenders useful frames and methodologies with which to approach Latina/o cinema. Appearing in a collection of essays on transnational dynamics in Latin American and Spanish cinemas, in “Deconstructing and Reconstructing ‘Transnational Cinema’” Deborah Shaw enumerates typologies of transnational cinema,² a move I replicate in order to trace what Latina/o cinema and its study can be. I offer the list of topics and subsequently expand on each: directors; star actors; political economies; content; audiences.

Directors

The question of a director’s identity can operate as an effective point of departure or pitfall. A critic’s engagement with the work of Latina/o directors is crucial since it gives much needed visibility to the director’s work and, as Romana Radlwimmer demonstrates in her essay on Lourdes Portillo, that engagement can initiate an understanding of the obstacles that Latina/o directors face. However, the presumption that a Latina/o director inevitably makes Latina/o films reflects an expectation that smacks of a problematic auteurism that exclusively foregrounds a director’s ethnicity.³ In short, one may believe a director’s Latina/o identity should readily manifest itself in a film, and a critic’s task becomes locating and scrutinizing that Latina/o content. Instead, the question of a director’s latinidad may take on situational embraces and omissions. Despite biographies and/or films that would suggest a director is Latina/o, particular filmmakers sometimes refuse the label of Latina/o (e.g., Natalia Almada), do not claim it but are classified as such in different media contexts (e.g., Guillermo del Toro), or have selectively accepted a Latina/o identity...