Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

5 “¿Soy Punkera, Y Que?” Sexuality, Translocality, and Punk in Los Angeles and Beyond

“¿Soy Punkera, Y Que?” Sexuality, Translocality, and Punk in Los Angeles and Beyond My theory had precedence. Stay with me on this. The Clash, for instance , jazzed up their music with this reggae influence—a direct reflection of their exposure to the Caribbean diaspora and its musical expression there in London. Nothing new—the usual white man appropriation of an exotic other story—anyway, the Sex Pistols , my theory went, were going to do the same with Norteño, the ole Tex Mex. I was going on the assumption that the Pistols probably heard the conjunto on KCOR or Radio Jalapeño on the bus ride down from Austin. But the point is, it worked. Talk about your revisionist histories! Greil Marcus is gonna flip! —Molly Vasquez, from Jim Mendiola’s 1996 film, Pretty Vacant When Alice, lead singer for The Bags rock group, takes the stage in torn fishnet hose and micro-mini leopard-skin tunic, she explodes into convulsive, unintelligible vocals. The effect is a raw sexuality not for the fainthearted. —Los Angeles Times, 1978 The xeroxed flyer advertising Pretty Vacant, Jim Mendiola’s 1996 independent short film, depicts the much loved figure of the Mexican La Virgen de Guadalupe strumming, of all things, an upside-down electric guitar à la Jimi Hendrix.1 As a U.S.-born Chicana who, in the 1980s, was rescued from the suburbs of Los Angeles by the Ramones, X, and Dead Kennedys, I must admit that I was captivated by this image and intrigued by the film’s title, an obvious reference to the British Sex Pistols. A guitar juts out from La Guadalupe at a right angle, transforming the familiar oval shape of La Virgen’s image into the shape of cross, or an intersection 5 147 of sorts. What was this flyer suggesting by juxtaposing these deeply symbolic , yet seemingly unrelated, cultural icons? How did the title relate? And why did this deliciously irreverent image prompt me to think of the critically acclaimed graphic novella series Love and Rockets by Los Bros. Hernandez?2 And the title? Pretty Vacant is one of the “hit” songs of the infamous 1970s British punk band, the Sex Pistols. Again, what is this flyer suggesting? With all due respect, what and who lie at the intersection of Guadalupe and punk? It turns out that the protagonist of Pretty Vacant, Molly Vasquez, like the fierce Latina characters of the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets graphic novella series and, most important, real-life Angelino Chicana punk musicians, lives at that particular intersection.3 The film depicts a week in the culturally hybrid “Do-It-Yourself” world of “La Molly” Vasquez, the off-beat, twenty-something, English-speaking Chicana feminist , artista, bisexual, punkera subject who lives in a working-class area 148 | “¿Soy Punkera, Y Que?” Promotional flyer for Jim Mendiola’s Pretty Vacant. (Reprinted with permission .) of San Antonio, Texas. Her love of the Sex Pistols leads her to the discovery of a well-kept secret that allows her, as a producer of ’zines and a beginning filmmaker, to rewrite rock ’n’ roll history by inserting herself and Tejano culture into its narrative. All this while she prepares for a gig in her all-girl band, Aztlán-a go-go. Pretty Vacant serves as a point of departure for my discussion of the emergence, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, of a punk “Do-ItYourself ” Chicana grass-roots feminist cultural production. This phenomenon circulated at the same time as other burgeoning Chicana activist and scholarly endeavors, as well as the East Los Angeles/Hollywood punk scenes, all of which still have not been examined in-depth. The film succeeds at what scholars of U.S. popular music have attempted—it shifts the paradigm that frames the reigning narrative of popular music produced in the United States.4 Disrupting the status quo narrative of popular music production (in this specific case, U.S. punk) by granting a young Latina (more specifically, a Tejana) the authority to chronicle the history of punk, the film compels scholars to acknowledge the complexity of “¿Soy Punkera, Y Que?” | 149 A still shot from Pretty Vacant (1996), directed by Jimmy Mendiola, of “La Molly” Vasquez (played by Mariana Vasquez). (Reprinted by permission.) popular music and popular music studies in the United States. Ultimately, the film viscerally unsettles long-held assumptions that unconsciously erase the...