Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands by A. Gabriel Meléndez (review)

Hidden Chicano Cinema addresses a series of 'film moments' that are cultural encounters between filmmakers who use film as a technology and the people of the communities that became the subjects for the film depictions. These film encounters often found Borderlands residents and filmmakers eyeing each other from opposite sides of the camera lens, thereby learning from, critiquing and/or categorizing each other.

The first chapters are dedicated to the advent of still photography and early film in New Mexico, which at the time was considered a "foreign locale" despite the fact that it is within the boundaries of the United States. During this early period, "segmented and mutually exclusive images of the Southwest lived in the public imagination" (1). These stereotypes left little room for representation of the 'triculturalism' that makes up this region.

Film Scholar Carlos Cortes explains that popular images were enculturated because we constantly receive information from a "societal curriculum" instilled by family, peers, and media that teaches a myriad of topics including race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality. Movies organize information about these very notions, influence values, help shape expectations of viewers, and provide models for action.

Cortes explains that films have several purposes which leave impressions on the audience. For example, films that use ethnic images examine national character. Films influence societal attitudes toward ethnic groups and take advantage of existing audience predispositions about them. Thus, filming the Borderlands has been a vast proposition that crafts images of Natives, Mexicans, and Anglos. It presents interethnic relationships these communities create, all within a mythic and wild Southwestern landscapes.

At times, this type of lens created a "tourist gaze" which highlighted the 'exotic other' and established a dominant Anglo-American view based on Manifest Destiny. The problem with early photography (Edward Curtis, Carl Taylor, and Russell Lee) and cinema representing Native 'others' was that it was seen as part entertainment, part science, and part anthropology, in which documentarians swooped down over the Southwest in search of exotic prey.

Eventually a shift occurred in the representation of the New Mexico Borderland in film. These "Social Realism" representations demonstrated the lives of Chicanos in the United States during the Cold War period. One such example is the film Salt of the Earth (1954). It focused upon a Mexican-American worker labor struggle in a New Mexican mining district (Zinc Town, USA). This was a major rotation in the choice of subjects for filmmakers because the lens added needed criticism to social and economic relationships that were the product of centuries of exploitation and inequality; as well as drawing attention to women's emerging rights.

Salt of the Earth is also unique because it can be considered a seminal Chicano film. "On the basis of its significance to [and collaboration with] the Chicano communities… it is obvious that its very creation was meant to ameliorate the conditions faced by Chicano workers and their families… [As such], the Chicano/a community of the Southwest embraced Salt of the Earth as an expression of Mexican American cultural resilience and strength" (95).

Hidden Chicano Cinema's final chapters look at several film encounters produced once Chican@s took hold of the camera, returned their gaze, and gave expression to their own creative voices. One such representative film is based on the 1974 'cult novel' The Milagro Beanfield War. "The story of this Chicano-themed film begins with the author, John Treadwell Nichols, and his thirty-plus years of identification with New Mexico, in particular with the rural Indo-Chicano population of northern New Mexico" (167). The novel, and the subsequent film directed by Robert Redford addressed a resistance politics of Native American and Chicano communities against globalization and domination by world capitalism. Yet, it did so through the use of satire, irony, and humor within the genre of Magical Realism. Specifically, Milagro is effective in sending a message about New Mexico to its audience. It is a poor place, but in the face of this...