What We (Don’t) See on the Screen
Movies and TV have always been an integral part of my childhood. I grew up in the suburbs where the nearest metro station was a 15-minute drive, so if you had no car and no visa to travel with, television and the movie theater would be the closest thing to a vacation. So, I grew up transporting myself to places I might never go and finding heroes in people who had nothing in common with me through the screen. However, there were those instances where an American movie or show was about someplace that looked like my apartment complex and had characters that looked like me and my family, but each story felt the same. It was almost always that Mexicans were involved in drugs, Latinxs did not exist outside of L.A., and that undocumented people never got happy endings. It wasn’t until I got to college and made researching these aspects of visual culture part of my work that I saw deeper into what this all meant.
From One Day at A Time to Disney’s Coco and other films and shows standing as representative of Latin American/Latinx culture in the U.S., each way of telling Latinx stories has an impact that lasts beyond 2 seasons on Netflix or 90 minutes in the movie theater. Each one of these entertainment components becomes part of the public visual archive of the Latinx story in the U.S. The good, the bad, and the ugly (although historically mostly the bad and ugly) have and will shape how we think about Latin Americans/Latinxs in the U.S. when we look back to this archive. The problem is that this visual narrative is being constructed by people who have no stake in it or who
only care about the paycheck that comes after the community streams this content. Because even as we demand more Latinx representation and inclusion in the media, we must simultaneously demand that this be a nuanced representation and a fair inclusion or we risk homogenizing a group of people that is diverse in language, race, immigration status, and so much more.
For example, in Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film, The Bling Ring, a fictional recounting of the ring of teenagers who burglarized Beverly Hills celebrity homes, the erasure of Diana Tamayo, an undocumented Mexican girl involved in the burglaries, is a point of interest. The replacement of Tamayo’s character with a white, citizen, valley girl character is theorized to not have been a major point of contention during production because it would not have benefitted Coppola to portray an undocumented character in a bad light at a time when immigration reform was such a hot topic (Rivas 2013). This furthers the narrative that people who are undocumented are one-dimensional beings that must have squeaky clean reputations to be valid or worthy of visibility and respect. This is in contrast to the messy, complicated, and ugly parts of growing up that most adolescents experience like experimentation with drugs, stealing, or romantic relationships.
For those that are undocumented, these messy and complicated rites of passage make them subject to deportation or greatly hinder their ability to get citizenship in the future. Undocumented adolescents are not allowed to mess up, take risks, or learn from their mistakes. They are not allowed to be human. This is what Tamayo’s erasure in The Bling Ring exemplifies. Furthermore, rushed production and systemic racism in Hollywood allow Tamayo’s story to be brushed off as an inconvenience that can be written out for the sake
of sensationalization, glamor, and profit. Coppola’s unwillingness to approach this side of human and political complexity in her glamorized depiction of Beverly Hills burglaries begs us to question if these citizen Hollywood writers and directors should be the ones to tell these stories.
When I have younger students or kids or nieces or grandkids, I want them to be able to learn about a history made by the people it’s about. While white anglo-american children can look back on their visual archive with Cinderella, Indiana Jones, and even glamorized burglars like The Bling Ring, I want kids who share my culture to be able to see more than narcos, death,
and exclusion. The Latinx and Undocumented experiences aren’t always pretty and perfect as stated before, and the concept of Latinidad and Citizenship themselves are very complicated. However, having an accurate visual archive of it all (which has historically lacked the good) can do so much for people who won’t have to imagine leaving their culture behind as a form of escape, but can find solace and comfort within its nuanced existence.