Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands

Toward a New Proxemics

216 the commitment to record the group experience of Chicanos from an insider vantage point and in the service of a documentary impulse represents a decided turn in the cinematic representation of Mexican Americans , a move which also makes it appropriate to speak of a number of documentary and independent film projects ushered in by the Chicano movement as filmic autoethnographic works. Autoethnographic Documentaries and Docu-Dramas The volume of such films produced in the last thirty years makes it nearly impossible to cover in a single chapter the gamut of self-representational impulses, so I seek to give space to but a small number of projects. Moctezuma Esparza’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez () is based on Américo Paredes’s brilliant study of the epic border ballad about a young vaquero, Gregorio Cortez, and his run-in with Texas lawmen. Although Ballad deals with a historical event on the Texas-Mexico border in , both the ballad and the film are a synecdoche of post- Anglo-mexicano conflict in the Southwest. In this regard, the film’s symbolic content reads the same for all Chicanos, a point that allowed Esparza the freedom to film Ballad in New Mexico and not in south Texas where it takes place. He made the decision both for symbolic and practical reasons—a major one being that the location reinforces the film’s documentary feel:  toward a new Proxemics Historical, Mythopoetic, and Autoethnographic works towArD A new ProxeMiCs 217 Because that movie, as you know, Gregorio Cortez has this neorealistic quality to it and you feel like you are there, the way the camera moves, . . . the naturalistic performance of the actors. You know, things are not quite choreographed; they are more staged, if the distinction makes sense to you. People are allowed, put into a set and allowed to play out their roles in a naturalistic way and Bob [Robert Young] covered it, and that’s why the movie feels a little bit like a documentary. (Esparza interview) In  Jack Parson (cinematographer) and Michael Earney (director) produced Luisa Torres, a documentary funded by the New Mexico Arts Division and the National Endowment for the Arts. Like its close predecessor, Agueda Martínez, the Parson-Earney film follows the life of an elderly woman from northern New Mexico as a means to document a way of life deeply connected to the earth and to the traditions of her forebears. The film, which also had the sponsorship of the Anthropology Film Center based in Santa Fe, is the attempt of a new generation of post-Chicano movement filmmakers to document traditional Hispano/Chicano lifeways. Whereas Esparza’s Agueda Martínez resounded with social meaning as implied by land tenancy, livelihood, and the economy of self-sufficiency, the Luisa Torres documentary aims to better understand the worldview of an older woman, giving greater attention to documenting the religio-philosophical tenets exposed by a nuevomexicana elder and matriarch. The documentary becomes an example of autoethnography largely because narrator-translator and participant-observer Gioia Tama spent an extended period of time living next to the Torres family, thus establishing a personal relationship with Doña Luisa well in advance of any filming. In some ways the film is also about Tama and this time of her life. Tama, a native speaker of Spanish but not a native New Mexican, manages to have meaningful and extended conversations with Luisa Torres and her husband, Eduardo, many of which mark the forty-three-minute film. In introducing the subject of the film, Tama is clear about announcing her own part in the making of the documentary: This is Luisa Torres. I call her mamá. She has been like a mother to me ever since I first came to this valley. We are neighbors now, vecinas . Because I have known mamá and her husband Eduardo now for 218 HiDDen CHiCAno CineMA many years, I was asked by my friends to help make this film about her and her life here in Guadalupita. The bond of friendship between Luisa and Tama has grown deep over the years and rests on mutual respect. Tama is so deeply identified with the family that she has been given permission to call Luisa “mamá” and her husband, Eduardo, “papá.” These familiar exchanges and courtesies suggest that the filmmakers have dispensed with the objectifying proxemics of the kind that is so commonplace in classic ethnographic encounters between...