Rosa
Linda Fregoso
"Humor As
Subversive De-construction in Born in
The Bronze Screen: Chicana &
Chicano Film Culture
(Minneapolis, MN: 1993). 49-63.
______________________________________________________
In Cheech Marin's Born in
As this "red-white-green" French woman interrupts the brown
economy of
Born in
Prior to Born in
Grotesque Realism
We have seen the extent to which Marin deploys the enigmatic
image of the French woman in order to universalize the parody of Chicano
voyeurism. Yet because the filmmaker ironically inflects the French woman's
body with Chicano symbols and iconography in both the opening and closing
scenes, film critic Chon Noriega reads her image in relation to a major subtext
in the film, its subtle critique of the claims about "
But, in certain respects, the process of encoding particular social and
cultural meanings onto images/language/sound does not correspond neatly with
decoding strategies. Viewers may or may not get he point, so the problem of
equivocation surfaces. To be sure, objections may be raised about the
objectifying impulse in the image of the French woman, yet, because a comedic
mode predominates in the film, images and scenes in Born in
Emily Hicks underscores the centrality of the "grotesque" in the
works of borderlands writers, indicating, "what
Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World calls 'the
grotesque' has not been homogenized out of the metaphors deployed in border
writing." Bakhtin's observations about the
popular tradition of grotesque realism, even though based on research in
another context, are especially helpful in locating the mechanism of humor
operative in Born in
Bakhtin's discussion of the privileged space of
laughter and the relationship between popular traditions and artistic
expression sets the stage for contextualizing Born in
For thousands of years, folk culture strove at every stage of its
development to overcome by laughter, render sober and express in
the language of material bodily lower stratum (in an ambivalent
sense) all the central ideas, images, and symbols of official culture.
Bakhtin's insight on the strategy of expression "in the language of the lower stratum" parallels Marin's imaging strategy of sexually objectifying the French woman. Yet, in today's context, the allegorical relation of the French woman to the "Statue of Liberty" also means something else as well.
If the analogy between the French woman as signifier for sexual desire and the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of desire for a better life is properly grasped, then the strategy of sexually objectifying the French woman spills over onto the Statue of Liberty, effecting a critiqueof the hypocrisy of dominant culture. Yet this potential-the subversion of a revered icon of dominant cuIture -may also turn against itself, normalizing the general objectification of women in dominant cinema. As the image functions to parody male voyeurism, directing its critique against the subjects of the gaze, the inscription of sexual desire onto the French woman simultaneously reproduces dominant imaging strategies. Thus the ambivalence of the imaging strategy interpellates viewers in contradictory positions, as coproducers of the objectifying impulse and as coparticipants of ironic excess.
Marin further attempts to couple social critique with imagery characteristic of grotesque realism. The jail scene's affinities with grotesque realism stem from its use of degradation for comedic effect. According to Bakhtin, "the essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity."" Moreover, the principle of degradation takes various forms. The artistic expression of this principle, according to Bakhtin, may assume a verbal form of abuse, for instance, what the writer characterizes as the dual tone of "praise/abuse in language," or a visual form, as images that are "ugly, monstrous, hideous from the point of view of 'classic' aesthetics"
During a brief stay in jail, Rudy disfigures a tattoo of a Chicana "home-girl" on the chest of an estranged inmate. A misogynistic humor, rendered through elements of absurdity, predominates throughout the scene. The opening shots depict Rudy's hand on a circuit breaker followed by a shot of a prison inmate strapped on an electric chair, screaming in pain, thereby giving the impression that we are witnessing an execution. However, Rudy was actually turning on the electrical current, and the inmate was accidentally sitting on top of the tattoo instrument. Ironic and satirical excess reverberates through the contrast between the "ugly" and "hideous" features of the inmate and Rudy's "normal" composure.
The tattoo on the chest of the inmate depicts the image of his beloved wife. In this respect, the tattoo is to be read as an honor symbolizing "ideal love," similar to that of the wedding vows " ill death do us part." The inmate's wife has left him for his brother, however, and Rudy is asked to remove the tattoo. Given that tattoos are permanent, Rudy suggests altering the image. His distasteful ideas for disfiguring the image ("Let's give her a black eye"; "break her nose"; "Draw a gun on one side and her brains splattering on the other") are enthusiastically received by the inmate. A shot/reverse-shot pattern is established between Rudy, disfiguring the tattoo, and the hideous facial expressions of the inmate, in simultaneous pain and pleasure. The act of violence is of course figurative, that is, directed onto the inscription of a face on the body of a male. The scene humorously privileges the therapeutic value of "mental" violence as a substitute for "concrete" acts, rendering the inmate's desire for revenge onto a figure and thus deflecting brutalization and violence from the body of a real person onto that of an image.
My focus on Marin's imaging strategy in these scenes of the jail and of the French woman directs attention to two moments of signification, the meanings of the images in the context of the narrative and the cinematic effects of this process. This distinction is crucial because, as Stephen Heath reminds us, "meaning is not just constructed 'in' the particular film, meanings circulate between social formation, spectator and film."" However grotesque its realism may be, the scenes of the tattoo and the French woman are nonetheless problematic precisely because violence against women is so prevalent in this society, outside cinematic representation, in the "real" world, so to speak. The objectification of the French woman, even in light of its comedic intention, normalizes the general derision of women in the social world as well.
Apart from its ambivalent treatment of women, Born in
Popularized throughout the Southwest and
Through performance, Tin-Tan and Cantinflas,
along with Palillo and Viruta
y Capulina,23 thus refashioned the persistent popular
expressions of resistance by a strategic artistic intervention. Here we have a
critique of power in its institutional and propertied forms that ultimately was
able to configure a space for unscrambling and reshaping mestizaje.
This skillful intervention would transform Tin-Tan and Cantinflas
into prolific as well as popular comedians amongChicano/a
and Mexican audiences. Outside the politics of the Chicano Movement, Cheech Marin had inflected a linguistic and cultural codeswitching practice drawn from two semiotic systems onto
his more properly commercial "mass" culture ventures, the Cheech and Chong series. Marin
would perfect his version of Chicano vernacular aesethetic
in Born in
Lo popular and Collectivity
In 1987, Born in
As the title makes evident, the unifying motif of the film is the parody of
Bruce Springsteen's rock hit "Born in the
However, it is not simply Springsteen's song that transverses the film, for
the authorial intention in this case was to promote the celebration of
working-class culture and resistance in the
In this manner, the parodic elements of both cultural forms reflect a more significant symbolic elaboration of the contradiction of whiteAmerican nativism, because as Marin exemplifies through humor, brown people are natives too. Born in East L.A. becomes an alternative way of saying America for Americans. Yet, contrary to the official versions of history taught in U.S. public schools and circulated in the media, certainly in the Southwest, the Mexican-origin population predates Anglo immigration. As such, the film reclaims a countermemory of struggle for Chicano/as. It elevates to the level of mainstream discourse that which, from the perspective of Chicana/os, has been silenced from "popular" mainstream memory: the conquest of the Southwest by Anglo-Americans. A further pun to Californians who, displaying the "California Native" bumper sticker, arrogantly view Chicanos as recent arrivals, it is not gratuitous that as Rudy is arrested by la migra, his words echo at a distance, "I'm a U.S. citizen, I was born in East L.A., my mother was born in East L.A., my grandmother was born in East L.A." Literally tracing this lineage, Rudy's family has been in Los Angeles at least since the early twentieth century.
The narrative disruption is generated through a role reversal on the part of the film's Chicano protagonist, Rudy. Narrative action begins with Rudy's carrying out his mother's request to meet his cousin Javier (Paul Rodriguez), an undocumented worker from Mexico, at the toy factory in downtown Los Angeles. Upon Rudy's arrival at the toy factory, U.S. immigration agents raid the factory. A core signifying element that interlaces the entire text, the "play of appearances," is introduced in this early film sequence. From the perspective of the white agent, Rudy looks or "appears" to be "Mexican." Despite his insistence that he was born in East L.A., the clarity of his enunciation in English, his Chicano-style dress and mannerism, Rudy is forcefully deported to Mexico along with the Mexican workers employed in the toy factory. His cousin Javier, however, arrives at the factory moments after the raid and is later taken by the factory owner to Rudy's home-the space where Javier is to remain throughout the film. From this narrative instance, the role reversals of Rudy and Javier motivate the primary desire of the film's subject: Rudy's quest to return to East L.A. from Mexico (Tijuana). The task of the plot thus becomes the demonstration of the protagonist's ability to resolve those conflicts necessary for the final narrative equilibrium or closure. In the process, the subject's skills at maneuvering and improvising are sharply illustrated.
The film spotlights role reversal through a visual-spatial contrast between the subject's quest to return and the object of his desire: the space occupied by his cousin, Javier. In other words, the film confines Javier to the space of Rudy's desire (his home in East L.A.) whereas Rudy inhabits the conflict-ridden space where Javier should be (Tijuana). Parody punctuates these dual spaces, humorously converting the "play of appearances" into a subversion of images. In the initial sequence (the factory raid) spatial contradiction is depicted through comical role reversal, a strategy that subsequently permits a number of signifying elements to materialize as cinematic tensions. Anchoring the tale in double entendre, Born in East L.A. de-constructs dominant images and codes and offers powerful instances of social critique.
Rudy's fate is sealed at the moment he is asked by the migra to prove his citizenship by answering the question, "Who's the president of the United States?" The double entendre in Rudy's response is ingenious: "That's easy. That guy who used to be on Death Valley. John Wayne." In the eyes of the INS agent (who speaks in a typically southern drawl), Rudy has failed to revere properly an American icon, dooming him to deportation. But the subversiveness of Rudy's response lies in the truth behind the joke. Rudy's wrong answer was in fact a "right" one. In voting for Ronald Reagan, Americans were voting for John Wayne and for everything these two icons of mainstream culture represent.
The text of the film generally upholds cinematic realism, but several sequences interrupt the linear narrative flow and thereby alter the referential illusion commonly ascribed to a Hollywood mainstream film. This effect is first established by the back-to-back visual-narrative contrast in the film's opening pair of sequences. Marin renders cinematic realism its due in the first mise-en-scene at his home but follows with a voyeurism played as grotesque comedy in the subsequent "Chicano pursuit of a white woman in the barrio" scene. 26 Throughout the film, Marin employs mainstream cinematic codes of realism only to splice them with absurd elements. During the migra chase scene, for instance, where Rudy attempts to cross the border several times but fails, the filmmaker introduces a collage of absurd dramatic action and music in place of dramatic realism.
By scoring what dominant culture believes to be a favorite tune among Mexicans, the "Mexican Hat Dance" ("EI Jarabe Tapatio"), the film ritualizes the migra chase scene as a hide-and-seek game. To the "Jarabe Tapatio," Rudy "dances" with la Migra, whether camouflaging himself as a shrub or teaching the Mexicanos the art of tag football. The playfulness of the film's formal techniques subverts, disrupts, and ritualizes the logic of fictional realism, reclaiming a pleasurable cinematic experience through humor. Other playful scenes further confirm Marin's acumen for capturing the significance of popular commercial culture in shaping everyday lives.
The most subversive quality of Born in East L.A. is the effectiveness with which the film reverses the dominant society's codes of positive/ negative value embodied in such binary systems of representation as the white as good/black as evil polarity, or the view of the flag as a value of patriotism and an upside-down flag as unpatriotism. Rudy is the viewers' object of identification yet he is also the central subject of the film's discourse. Consequently his actions and attitudes elicit identification by the spectator. By re-constructing Rudy as the object of our identification, the film challenges our viewing habits in a number of ways.
The drug-smuggling sequence depicts two elderly white people traveling from Mexico in an RV and returning home through the border crossing. Without their knowledge, Rudy has hidden inside the camper. As the couple talks with the border-patrol guard, they relate their enjoyment of the sights as well as the fact that the "Mexican people are wonderful ... we love the people." In dominant discourse, an elderly couple traveling around in a recreational vehicle is positively valorized or coded as a "harmless" retired coupleperhaps even as signifying an easy prey for thieves (i.e., "Mexicans"). Moreover, in dominant practices of representation, the differential relation between Rudy and the retired couple would certainly be constituted in the following equation: Rudy signifies a "sleazy," "greasy," dark-skinned, Medellin-cartel drug runner, 27 whereas the elderly couple is a signifier for "innocent" American tourists, an innocence/guilt binarism. Furthermore, the cultural code of vacationing in a luxurious camper signifies that they are naturally enjoying their hard-earned life savings.
The film discourse, however, de-constructs precisely these dominant social codes and constructs an entirely new significance. As it turns out, the drug-sniffing dogs discover the elderly couple is smuggling a van full of marijuana back to the United States, while Rudy is actually a harmless guy hiding in the RV, simply attempting, in whatever way possible, to return home. Because the film maps viewer identification with Rudy, it also re-codifies a new meaning for the image of a Chicano. As opposed to the barrage of media images, not all drug smugglers are of Latino extraction. The film forces viewers to engage domitinant codes of valorization and, in so doing, positions viewers in the unsettling role of questioning hegemonic racist signs.
Besides subverting the binary system of representation, the film rearticulates an internationalism among people of color in the United States .28 One of the many jobs that Rudy has to take in order to save money for his return to Los Angeles is that of "tutoring" a group of Asians on how to look and act "American." At first glance, the tutoring sequences seem to render a Chicana/o stereotype of Asians; however, a deeper reading of the scenes reveals a more important strategy driving this representation. From the perspective of the white businessman who had hired Rudy to "Americanize" the Asians, their ethnicity was indiscernible. He tells Rudy that they are either "Chinese," "Indians," or "something." The film's background music, however, encodes them as ethnically Asian. Rudy proceeds to teach them the style, mannerism, talk, and dress of a Chicano from East Los Angeles. At the end of the film, Rudy, his Salvadorena girlfriend, and the undocumented Asians finally reach East L.A., by entering a street in the midst of a Cinco de Mayo parade through a "man"hole. Passing as Chicanos, the Asians, -hen they spot a police officer, immediately assume the East L.A. youth posture and manner of walking, give the officer a "high five" hand slap, and say, "Go Raiders."
The film thereby critiques the dominant social discourse of racism that fixes a binary system of representation between native-born and foreign-born in terms of the figurative markers of skin color, or "white" as native and "dark" as foreigner. Constructed within the film is a dominant perspective that is unable to differentiate an Asian from an Indian, or a Mexican immigrant from a Chicano native. However, the film itself dismantles this inscription for its viewers. The very cinematic fact that the film allows spectators a knowledge of its narrative truth, that Rudy is U.S. -born and that the Asians are not Indian, problematizes dominant ideology's racist notion of nativeness. If the figurative marker of the dominant culture is the color of one's skin, then Cheech Marin pushes this hegemonic distinction to its ultimate consequences. Because all people of color "look alike," then Asians can be taught to act like Chicanos and vice versa. Ultimately the filmmaker's critique of dominant culture illustrates the opacity of racism.
Marin's appreciation for commercial popular culture as an axis of identity is equally brilliant in this part of the film. In their masquerade as Chicanos, the Asians are required to pay homage to the most revered football team for L.A. Chicanos, the L.A. Raiders. The Raiders are favorites not just because they are the Los Angeles home team, but because this was the first pro-football team with a Chicano coach (Tom Flores) and a Chicano quarterback (Jim Plunkett).
Marin also represents the syncretism of commercial popular culture with Chicano/Mexican music tradition. When Rudy spots a Mexican trio in the cantina, he decides to join them by playing "Summertime Blues," a song recorded by Ritchie Valens's best friend, Eddie Cochran. 29 One of the trio's members is played by Chicano conjunto musician Steve Jordan, whose accordion-music recordings effectively syncretize Tejano conjunto and rock-and-roll musics. Later, Rudy attempts to teach the trio "Twist and Shout," a song by white songwriters, which the trio hears and plays back to Rudy as "La Bamba." Blending music from Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, Rudy and the trio perform "Purple Haze" in their debut as a newly formed band the "Nuevos Huevos Rancheros"-an interlingual pun betweennew wave" and "huevos rancheros."
The film's finale Offers a Utopian vision for cultural politics. In the scene prior to the narrative's closure, Rudy had finally earned enough money to purchase his way back, or to be smuggled into the United States by a coyote. The penultimate sequence depicts an intense encounter between the coyote and a husband who did not have enough money to cover his wife's fare on the contraband journey. The emotional good-bye between the wife and husband provokes Rudy's decision to give his own space on the truck to the woman. Ultimately, this sacrificial act on the part of an individual leads to a collective resolution for the narrative. Determined to return home, Rudy, along with hundreds of thousands of undocumented "brown" people, descends from the mountaintop upon two unsuspecting border agents. Through evoking this political/religious metaphor of struggle, Born in East L.A. resists ideology of individual heroism at the same time that the film reaffirms the sense of collectivity.
In their book Camera Politica, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner entertain the political significance of experimenting within Hollywood through the "recoding of conventional formulas that transcend some of their ideological limitations." The authors therefore call on oppositional filmmakers to create a different sense of progressive clinema, a politics that "rather than conceive of the Hollywood represensentational system as being inherently ideological ... would assume instead that what matters are the effects representations have."" One of the effects we can attribute to Cheech Marin's recent intervention within the Hollywood system is certainly that his cultural form transcends "social expectations" and "normative assumptions" regarding what shape Chicano/a symbolic creations should take. He does so by liberating the "image" from the constraints of the dominant cultural codes and the "correct" mode for political cinema. In this manner, Marin injects a liberating imagination back onto social and cultural discourses. He re-inscribes a Chicano political space that ruptures both the notion of Hollywood hegemony and borders of political correctness in Chicano cinema. At the very least, Marin gives us an alternative form for a Chicano/a activist aesthetics, one that draws from a vernacular tradition and re-constitutes, albeit in the ideal, a new social world through collective strength. In its narrative closure, Born in East L.A. embraces a consciousness of the social and symbolic struggle that the Chicano artist Gronk best evokes with the following spatial and temporal metaphor: "Borders don't apply now. East L.A. is everywhere."
Conclusion: Mestizaje (Hybridity) in Cultural Politics
Exemplifying the extent to which Chicanos have their own tradition of inquiry into the politics of representation, Born in East L.A. is a mestizaje of cultural codes. Like the hybridized mode of enunciation of black diaspora filmmaking in Britain '33 and the Latin American cinema, Born in East L.A. extracts from an aesthetic tradition that is indigenous to the American continent. As I have noted elsewhere, the cultural configurations of the continent led to profound renovations in the conceptualization of culture to the extent that Latin American filmmakers, for instance, logically re-formulated a new aesthetics from the indigenous tendencies. Moreover, for the New Latin American Cinema movement, the emphasis has been on the theoretical and political space of lo popular. Since 1958, the three components of the New Latin American Cinema have been expressed in terms of "nationalist, critical, and realist" films. Because its filmmakers also sought to "interpret, express, and communicate" with the people, lo popular progressively formed a central theoretical and political tenet of the movement. In other words, a significant project has begun to emerge that links cultural politics to a "re-discovery" of lo popular. This space is not manifest transhistorically, but can only be discernible within the historical dynamic, and mestizaje is the term that refers to this process. Similar to the "creole" or "hybrid" articulations of British blacks, in Latin America mestizaje construes, in the words of Jesds Martfn-Barbero, "the intermingling, the impurity of relations between ethnic group and class, of domination and complicity.
To these cultural configurations, the Chicana/o experience contributes an additional layer of complexity: the historical circumstance that the now-discarded model "internal colonialism" attempted to explain. The social history of the population of Mexican origin includes both the loss of a large part of Mexico's territory during the Mexican-American War of 1848 (conquest) and the subsequent waves of immigration to the United States during this century. Consequently, the Chicano/a collective memory articulates, in addition to the histories of colonialism and imperialism, those of conquest, marginalization, and domination within territories that, for many Chicana/os, are considered native (the Southwest). The formal expression of this historical development can be clearly recognized in the deliberate affirmation of bilingualism and biculturalism in Chicano/a vernacular aesthetics. It is precisely these multiaccentual forms and practices of "resistance" that are modulated by the "politics of representation" of Cheech Marin's Born in East L.A.
Yet Born in East L.A. goes one step further: its intertextuality refashions lo popular with cornmodified popular culture, centering both as axes of identity for late-twentieth-century Chicanas and Chicanos. In the music-video promo for the film ("Born in East L.A."), one of the ways Marin tries to make it back to East Los Angeles is through a sewer tunnel. As he looks into the tunnel his horrified facial expression evokes the laughter of viewers familiar with the film El Norte, where two immigrants came into the United States through a tunnel and were bitten by rats. In instances such as this parody the film offers a way out of cultural nationalism's disdain for dominant commerciaI culture and its tendency to fix meaning in one "true" path. Shuttling in between vernacular aesthetics and commodified popular culture, the filmmaker's acuity for the meaning of commodified culture in the everyday lives of Chicanos empowers those marginalized from the centers of power. In the words of Trinh T. Minh-ha:
To another sensibility, another consciousness of the condition of marginality: that in which marginality is the condition of the center.
Indeed, contrary to the nihilism of certain strands of bourgeois avantgarde, Cheech Marin's
popular aesthetic style affirms a profound respect for life, a humanism that so
often radiates from the symbolic elaboration of everyday tragedies. After all,
what is left after a day's hard work for below-subsistence wages but the
laughter at the comedic reenactments of one's misfortunes and the momentary
pleasure gained from commodified popular culture, or
from the tradition of performance in the carpas and
the dance halls? Yet in the film, as George Lipsitz
recently reminded me, popular culture is both "affirmative and more a part
of life than an escape from it." How does one transform this humor, this
creative energy, into collective will and political action? Born in East L.A.
uses comedy effectively, providing a cinematic experience whose pleasure
derives from humor. At the very least, in its critique of dominant racist
discourse about Chicanos, Born in East L.A. teaches us that the cultural
struggle must also be fought and won on the commercial screen.