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Chapter 1 Puerto Rican and Chicano Crossovers in Latino Film and Music Culture To the memory of Sammy Medina (RIP) Selena, Lopez, and Latino Identifications In a fascinating essay on Selena (2003), Frances Aparicio seeks to trace the history of Latino/a as opposed to specific national identifications. Interestingly, she notes how the publicity mill has taken not just one but three Puerto Ricans and sought to constitute them as Latino as opposed to Boricua figures for a Latinocentered market. This essay, originally drafted as a response to Aparicio’s, will show, among other things, that in spite of the U.S. Puerto Rican erasure in the very epistemology of Anglo America, and in spite of the negligible and negative representation of Puerto Ricans in film, Puerto Ricans, ironically enough, have participated significantly in subsuming Mexican and Chicano spaces in the configuration of Latino identities in U.S. and mainly Hollywood cinema. In this sense, the case of Jennifer Lopez’s representation of Selena is simply the most famous and crucial example of a rather unexceptional phenomenon. I’ve also tried to understand why Puerto Ricans have been able to play Mexicans, but—with the possible exception of the Mexico City–based movie biopic of composer Rafael Hernández and a recent television effort I’ll mention below—I can’t think of a single instance of Mexicans playing Puerto Ricans. A rather odd turn of thought, perhaps, but it may well have something important to tell us about the social construction of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Latino identities.1 The context for this examination is the evolution of Latino/a identity and its theorization in Suzanne Oboler, Félix Padilla, and others. Oboler’s critique constitutes a view of the emergence of the term as a top-down process aimed at labeling and homogenizing the various Latin Americans present in the United States. A similar slant is implicit in Arlene Dávila’s view of the effect of marketing in the creation i-xxx_1-202_Zimm.indd 1 7/14/11 10:43 AM 2 c h a p t e r 1 / C R O S S O V E R S I N L AT I N O F I L M A N D M U S I C of sponsored Latino identities (1997). Along with Aparicio, I agree with Agustín Laó-Montes, who argues that the particular groups that have extended beyond their national roots to consider themselves not only in nationalist but Latino terms have themselves played a significant role in the emergence of their sense of identity. Unlike Padilla (1985), who sought that identification in the political calculation of community leaders that each particular national group is too weak to achieve its rights on its own and seeks to adapt and win group acceptance for the broader label , I believe that the Latino base, the subaltern subject of Latinidad or Latinismo, the people in their barrios and their everyday life interactions, participate in the creation of Latino as opposed or complementary to specific national identities—and this in spite of their sometime resentment toward one group or another or toward the effects of the generalizing process on their sense of specificity. My own view is that all the manipulations and appropriations labeled Hispanic or Latino are not simply imposed or created but are based on certain commonalities or affinities of identity that result not from some racial or otherwise essentialist base, but rather from the imposition, however uneven, of similar, Iberian-based cultural patterns emanating from the colonial and postcolonial periods. In effect, the Conquest broke down the initial heterogeneity of the Americas, imposing a series of patterns that, however varied, constituted an Iberianization or, taking the Church dimension most seriously, a Latinization of the Amerindian populations and the African and other populations that came to inhabit the Latin American world. The term we call “Latino” designates that fragment of the Latin American world that, through conquest, treaty, or immigration, in territories that came, legally or formally, to belong to the United States. The Latino population has been subject to colonization, racialization, and stigmatization as well as the formation as a particular minority in the United States. Those who have arrived in successive waves in the twentieth century are Latin Americans who gradually, in varying degrees, have become Latinos. Recent patterns of transnational migration and the transnational cultural processes involved in the recent transformation of labor, media, information, and so forth have led...

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