Chicano Identity and Discourses of Supplementarity on Mexican Cinema: From ‘The Man Without a Fatherland’ (Contreras Torres, 1922) to ‘Under the Same

A radical change took place in Mexican narratives of belonging during the 1990s, when NAFTA was first negotiated. Narratives of migration drastically changed the status of Mexican migrants to the US, formerly derided as ‘pochos’, presenting them as model citizens instead. Following Derrida, I argue the role of the migrant became that of a supplement, which is, discursively, at the same time external to and part of a given unit, standing for and allowing deeper transformations to take place in the whole discourse of bilateral relations and national identity more generally. I use Derrida’s concept of the supplement to discuss changing representations of Chicanos in Mexican cinema, and to assess the extent that they have succeeded in reframing the discourse on national identity, with a focus on gender.

basis of Michel Foucault's theories that the social world, if it is to make sense, must be understood as a discourse, or in other words, as power/knowledge, and further, on Jacques Derrida's assertions that discourses, both textual and social, work on the basis of binary oppositions. (Foucault 1984) (Derrida, Of Grammatology 1976).
In short, my argument is that national identity is a particular kind of social discourse, one that articulates a combination of ethnicity, religion and language as corresponding to a territorially-based unit, also narrated as an ancestral homeland, and seeks to deploy these in ways that foreground difference with the other, its binary opposite. From the twentieth century on, cinema has had a crucial role in the articulating, contesting and spreading of these narratives. Understood as discursive in these ways, there have been two crucial moments during the twentieth century in which the discourse of national identity in Mexico has been transformed. In the paragraphs that follow, I shall outline the key features of these transformations, pointing to the role that Chicanos and Chicanas, as well as Mexicans that cross the border and settle in 'the other side' have had in bringing these about, and the various ways they have been represented on Mexican film.
The first crucial moment when the discourse of national identity was redefined took place after the revolution, when the state sought to integrate indigenous peoples and the working classes into the national project. 2 This was largely attempted by ascribing a positive connotation to the purported hybridity of Mexicans, characterising them as the healthier, stronger product of a pool of genes instead of the 'half breed' that had been prevalent before, and by pursuing policies of assimilation that sought to turn the remaining indigenous minorities into cultural mestizos. (Minna Stern 2003) 'The Indians' would from then on be regarded as ancestors, having existed in a mythical Golden Age the national destiny would one day return the people to. A strong sense of loyalty to the group was cultivated partly through pride in the cultural values that were different from the United States', especially the centrality of the family unit and traditions. And in this discursive field, Chicanos, then referred to derogatorily as pochos, were what Derrida would call undecidable. (Derrida, Limited Inc 1988, 148) Simultaneously claiming the Mexican identity and the American identity that was, until the 1990s, its discursive opposite, Chicanos put into question the fit between the political and the territorial unit that nationalism struggles to create. In other words, the undecidability of the Chicano identity exposed the contingency of the hegemonic meaning of 'Mexicanidad'. It is therefore not surprising that research on representations of Chicanos on Mexican cinema during this period, and also of Mexicans who crossed the border, has found them to be relatively few and overwhelmingly negative, relying on highly didactic narratives. David Maciel has classified them into three types. First of all, there were those stories of people who crossed the Rio Bravo 'to the land of the dollars in search of an 2 Headed by José Vasconcelos, the Ministry of Culture engaged in a broad scale attempt to produce artistic representations of Indigenous populations and the working classes, famously including the commissioning of murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and others. (Smith, 2004: 217) The murals later became central to Chicano identity. As will become evident in this piece, in Under the Same Moon, it is the murals too that enable community and identity.
illusive El Dorado', only to suffer unspeakable misfortune. (Maciel 1992, 110) Then there were those films that showed the pocho to be a sort of fake Mexican, a threat to the national culture who would, as it were, dilute or contaminate 'Mexicanidad' through the influence of the American culture of which he or she had become a bearer. And occasionally, a few films did celebrate not so much the immigrants, but those Mexicans who had fought in the 1847 war against the United States to preserve their land. In short, from Miguel Contreras Torres's El Hombre sin Patria/The Man without a Fatherland (1922), and through films with titles such as Los Desarraigados/The Uprooted (Gilberto Gazcón, 1958) and Espaldas Mojadas/Wetbacks (Alejandro Galindo, 1954), Mexican cinema consistently conveyed extremely negative views of Mexicans in the United States and their experience. Other researchers such as Norma Iglesias have identified similar topics, but have also highlighted issues of gender. The protagonists of these films were nearly always male, and the plight of their family left in Mexico was due to their absence. Any women of Mexican ancestry or Chicanas they encountered in the US were invariably prostitutes or thieves, who, in her words, 'may give an impression of happiness in a scene or two but whose life always ended in disgrace', not unlike the femmes fatales of film noir. (Iglesias Prieto, Retratos Cinematgáficos de la Frontera 2003, 336) (my translation) In addition, female characters faced much deeper identity crisis than their male counterparts since, as Iglesias argues and other research has demonstrated, Mexican women have a cultural reproduction role that men do not, so the male characters could simply transit from one culture to the other without having to compromise their identity in comparable ways. 3 (Iglesias Prieto, Retratos Cinematgáficos de la Frontera 2003, 341) According to Rafael Aviña, the preferred genres for topics related to Mexican migration to the US were thus the thriller and the drama, followed by very sensationalist melodrama, and comedy also featured, although more rarely. (Aviña 2004, 61-65) There was also of course what Iglesias terms 'cine fronterizo', border cinema: very low-budget films, featuring rather poor technical and narrative qualities, shown only at a few venues catering to immigrants at the border, but which were nonetheless extremely popular with their audiences. These films tended to focus on the thrills and dangers of crossing, and during the 1980s plots also included issues of drug dealing. (Iglesias Prieto, Retratos Cinematgáficos de la Frontera 2003, 234-235) Representations of Chicanos or of Mexicans crossing were not necessarily as negative as in the more mainstream Mexican cinema, but these films received no theatrical release beyond the border.
The discourse of national identity on which all these representations depended however was seriously challenged during the 1990s, since the onset of what David Harvey has termed the stage of 'flexible accumulation' of capital, and this I argue is the second crucial moment in which the discourse of national identity in Mexico was transformed. (Harvey 1991, 9-10) In Harvey's argument, technical, financial and institutional innovations have led from mass industrial production to globalised regimes of flexible accumulation. New sectors of production have emerged, including new ways of providing financial services, intensified rates of commercial, technological and organizational innovation, and above all, new markets that are no longer national in scope. Further, Arjun Appaudrai usefully put forward the notion of the translocality to account for a phenomenon whereby, due to increased migration and the availability of communication technology, the kind of media-based public sphere that Anderson theorised as having provided the cultural substratum for the nation-state was now giving birth to networked communities, composed by a collection of cities across national borders, linked by financial and trade operations as well as by tourism and family ties. (Appadurai 2003, 339) In Mexico, this phase that Harvey terms of 'flexible accumulation' of capital has been experienced, above all, in the form of a regional economic integration with the United States and Canada, while it was precisely the US-Mexico border and other US and Mexican cities such as Chicago, New York, Puebla and Morelia that were among the examples quoted by Appadurai as fitting his definition of a translocality. Therefore, the revolutionary nationalism discourse outlined above, that constructed national identity on the basis of mestizaje, a syncretic version of Catholicism and a Mexican version of the Spanish language, insisting on its natural fit to the territory, a discourse that had more-or-less successfully answered the question 'who are we?' since the Revolution, began to lose ground. This discourse was replaced by one that sought to find a new meaning for the identity in a supra-national arrangement, the North American Free Trade Area, a discourse which I have termed, following Derrida, of supplementarity. To Derrida, the supplement had a crucial function in any discourse, for while external to the unit that it supplements at the outset, it gradually becomes a part of it, in such a way that the unit is later not complete unless it takes into account its former supplement. The supplement thus allows for change in discourse. (Derrida, Of Grammatology 1976) And it is my contention that the new discourse in question involved the re-framing of all key issues in the very complex bilateral relationship between Mexico and the US, including the external debt, drug trafficking and crucially migration, into narratives of partnership and supplementarity. (De La Garza 2009) Thus dependence for trade on the United States, formerly narrated as an obstacle to be overcome in order to achieve development, was instead presented as privileged access to the American market. More to the point, migration was also recast from a problem in which the United States was a passive victim, into the result of push-pull factors in the world economy that drew the labour force to where jobs were available, for the mutual benefit of both countries and ultimately the world, a situation that would otherwise correct itself as the Mexican economy improved. In 1995 a law allowing dual nationality for Mexican citizens was passed. At the national university, the Centre for Research on North America, formerly devoted to the US and Canada, broadened its remit to include Mexico. By 1999, Vicente Fox, then a presidential candidate, emphasised the proposed creation of institutions for the welfare of migrants, whom he cast as heroes, enthusiastically encouraging Mexicans to, like them, 'dream the American dream'.
Members of Congress to represent migrants were appointed in Zacatecas, one of the key sending states, and were proposed in other states as well. Even CNN weather forecasts shown in Mexico included Mexican cities when telling the forecast for the US. In short, if, as Foucault observed, 'the successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing [the] rules…[to] invert their meaning', the re-grafting of some of the key signifiers that had under the revolutionary nationalism discourse given meaning to Mexicanity into new discourses of supplementarity was indeed a success of the younger generation of the political and business elite of the period. (Foucault 1984, 86) They recast 'dependence' as 'opportunity', 'development' as 'integration', and allowed for national identity to be understood as Mexican even beyond the territorial borders of the nation.
And again, the discourse of supplementarity found expression on film, especially after the large-scale privatization that took place during the Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo administrations (1988-1994 and 1995-2000 respectively), in what is now called the 'Buena Onda Cinema'. (Wood 2006) It was of course Alfonso Arau's highly successful Like Water for Chocolate (1992) that inaugurated the trend. In this film, although it is not for the protagonist Tita to marry the American doctor, for as Barbara Tenenbaum has observed, it would have been easy for Mexican audiences to understand this as another instance of 'La Malinche', her aptly named niece Esperanza does marry the doctor's son, leaving integration to the new generations. (Tenenbaum 1997, 158) A plethora of gendered discourses in the media at the time also described Mexican and American integration in similar terms. Examples range from Sidney Weintraub's A Marriage of Convenience: Relations Between Mexico and the United States, published in 1990, to the description of the embrace between the majors of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, an American man and a Mexican woman respectively, who crossed the border to celebrate the 'arrival of the new millennium with an international hug and a kiss'. (Domínguez and Fernández de Castro 2001, 155) In a similar vein, Santitos, a farcical comedy by Alejandro Springall (1998), tells the story of a woman also called Esperanza, who goes to the United States believing her daughter has been kidnapped and is being held there. Her quest takes her all the way from Veracruz to Los Angeles, which on the film is shown to be as any other Mexican City would be. Esperanza cannot find her daughter there, but she finds and falls in love with no other than Angel, a wrestler famous for fighting and defeating 'La Migra'. 4 The film thus involves a process of negotiation of this woman's identity as Mexican beyond the territorial borders, and as a Spanishspeaking Catholic who nonetheless resorted to prostitution on her way to the US in her attempts to find her daughter. While she fails in this endeavour, she succeeds in beginning a new life in the U.S. But, as I have argued elsewhere, perhaps more forcefully than all these, the narrative that presented Chicanos and Mexican immigrants to the US as a supplement was put forward by Arau's son Sergio in 2004 with his A Day without a Mexican. (De La Garza 2009) In his words, 'the film sought to make visible that which is invisible by removing it'. (Arau in Coll 2004) The idea, he explained, came from the 'Day without Art' organised in New York in 1994 when all museums and galleries closed for a day, to pay homage to those artists who had died as victims of AIDS. It is constructed around a simple but effective plot: the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all Latino immigrants from the state of California. This disappearance brings the economic and social life of the region to a standstill and the consequences are explored in the mockumentary. Moreover, its theatrical release closely matched Appadurai's map of the Mexican-American translocality, bringing audiences for the opening night in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, among other cities in the US, to share the same culture-laden time with audiences in Mexico City and Guadalajara. The film ultimately had a mixed reception, since, unlike the short version filmed in 1998, it represented 'Mexicans' only as unqualified labour power, being the gardeners, maids and drivers that sustain the American dream, a picture that ignored the contributions of the many Chicanos and Mexican immigrants in the arts, higher education, investment and the liberal professions. The position that was critical to Arau could be summarized as arguing that there are Mexicans and Chicanos that are also part of the American dream, not just enabling it to happen but also living it, only that they dream it in Spanish, and this is their own right.
I would argue, however, that more important than the nature of the representations themselves is the fact that the stock of genres employed to depict the Mexican and the Mexican-American experience in the US was significantly broadened during this period. For, as John Corner reminds us, form is at least as important as content. (Corner 2002, 295) Form, after all, plays an important role in cuing modes of responding to the images, in promoting or hindering empathy with the characters, in eliciting realist or romantic modes of engagement with the stories told, and, in short, in turning narrated reality into either shocking or soothing bitsbytes. Therefore, it is significant not only that the experience of Chicanos and Mexican immigrants is now being narrated through genres other than the thriller and the very sensationalist melodrama, but specifically through the mock documentary, a postmodern genre based on parody and disbelief towards metanarratives including nationalism, even if it is also an inherently ambiguous, and also an inherently hybrid genre. More recently, in another instance of hybridisation to express narratives of national identity under migration, it was the task of Under the same Moon by Patricia Riggen (2008) to put forward new versions of Mexican immigrants and Chicanos. And it is to this film that I now turn to make my last point on the changing discourse of national identity and its representations of Chicanos and Mexican immigrants as supplements on Mexican cinema.
Under the Same Moon tells the story of Carlitos, a nine year old boy that illegally crosses the border to look for his (single) mother Rosario, herself an illegal immigrant working as a maid in the US, following the sudden death of his grandmother, who looked after him in Rosario's absence. The title alludes to a strategy for consolation as Rosario had told him that should he ever feel lonely, he should just look at the moon, because it would be the same moon she would be watching too, and they would be connected, knowing they were, in fact, together, 'under the same moon'. During his quest, Carlitos meets Enrique, another illegal immigrant-and surrogate father-who is at first hostile to the child but who gradually develops a close friendship with him and helps him find his mother. The film thus draws upon the conventions of-and hybridises between-both the road movie and a less sensationalist form of melodrama to tell its story.
As a genre, the road movie has often been regarded as quintessentially American and mostly concerned with identity quests. Typically, travellers embark in a journey of learning and (often self) discovery and there is a transformation as a result of the trip. To Stephen Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 'The road movie is […] a Hollywood genre that catches peculiarly American dreams, tensions and anxieties, even when imported by the motion picture industries of other nations'. (Cohan and Hark 1997, 2) Critics who hold this view argue this is because 'only America offers the geographic and symbolic conditions required to realise a road movie proper', these having to do with the mythology of the frontier and with the sense of freedom to reinvent onself afforded by the open space of the highway, both foundational to American identity. (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006, 5) 'These expansive spaces obviously recall the western's articulation of the frontier […] However, the road movie re-invents the western's pre-industrial iconography of slow-paced horse treks as motorised motion and speed'. (Laderman 2002, 14) As Enrique and Carlitos are illegal immigrants, of course, their journey takes place mostly by bus or hitchhiking. But the public or borrowed nature of the transport they employ does not prevent them from gaining access to this travelling experience that the genre has turned into an inherently 'American' one. They too are shown on the road, amidst the kind of romanticised landscape that is read as 'a sign of the infinite opportunities awaiting travellers' including, in their case, finding jobs and protection almost wherever they go and even being given a lift by a famous music band. 5 (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006, 14) By the end of the trip, Enrique has learned to rid himself of the anger and selfishness he displayed in the beginning, even risking to be deported to help the child, and in performing the role of a father he has learned to become one. For Carlitos, the journey is mostly about reconstructing the (Mexican) family beyond the borders of the nation, and it involves the negotiation of the role of the father, as at one point Enrique and Carlitos do find the latter's biological father, also an illegal immigrant in the US, but he disavows the child and the journey continues in the company of Enrique. If the metaphor famously employed by Octavio Paz when he attempted to trace Mexican identity back to the indigenous mother and the Western (Spaniard) father still holds, it would seem the proposal in this fundamentally oedipal narrative is to represent the possibility of a new Mexican identity, with a younger motherland that is perfectly capable to exist and sustain and nurture the identity beyond the borders-the older motherland, Rosario's mother, is dead-,and a father whose biological background is irrelevant, a father who becomes one just by performing as such, and whose sacrifice is ultimately essential for the realisation of this new version of the identity. (Paz 1967) Inasmuch as the main role of the father is to provide for the material conditions of existence and rule in a patriarchal family, this role is to be shared by Rosario and the American state.
This leads us to the other genre that is central to the story, namely melodrama, traditionally aknowledged as existing in many cultures and times but flourishing profusely in Mexico, especially as regards 'telenovelas', soapoperas. Melodrama was for a long time derided as crude, manipulative and sensationalist. However, the genre has now been re-conceptualised as an important part of poular culture concerned with the family and women, and also a potentially subversive one given its focus on excess, which challenges supposedly realist representations that are in fact thoroughly ideological. More importantly for our purposes here however is the fact that melodrama as a genre is not regarded as inherently Western, and indeed is often valorised for 'the ways [it] illuminates deeper structres of other cultures'. (Dissanayake 1993, 2) In a renewed 'mestizaje' of sorts then, Riggen's combination of precisely the American road movie and Mexican melodrama tells as much of her subject matter as does the story itself. At first sight it would seem that a road movie with melodramatic undertones is far better suited to represent Mexican immigrants and Chicanos than were the thrillers on drug dealing and prostitution of the period 1950s-1980s; the ambiguous, post-modern mockumentaries and satirical farces of the 1990s and early 2000s; or indeed the open didacticism of the silent cinema, when the likes of The Man Without a Fatherland represented 'pochos' as fundamentally flawed, trecherous characters and the only hope for being (Mexican) lied in Mexican soil, with no possibility of disembedding the culture. Moreover, apart from the generic strategies that Under the Same Moon employed to tell the story, there is more that seems innovative and even progressive in this film. In a time when a Conservative and avowedly Catholic Party, the National Action Party (PAN, in Spanish), heads the country, the family unit is nonetheless approvingly represented as constituted by a single parent, initially the grandmother, and then Carlitos's mother. The absent father is not for this woman the cause of suffering and misfortune, but rather separation from her child. Female characters are overall seemingly empowered ones, not only the main character, Rosario, who is the immigrant and the breadwinner, but also nearly all supporting female characters have active roles, that is, they are shown to make things happen-even if not always entirely morally sound. Doña Carmen, for instance, played by Carmen Salinas, heads a group of 'coyotes' that bring illegal immigrants across the border. Doña Reyna, played by Maria Rojo, hosts illegal immigrants in her home and rescues the child from abduction at a moment he is about to be sold into prostitution. And even in the Chicano couple, it is the woman who takes the initiative to go into the illegal business, to help her partner fund his studies. In the car that crosses Carlitos over the border, it is she who is, literally and metaphorically, in the driving seat. The film would also seem to be advancing a feminist agenda in that the director and producer, Patricia Riggen, and the scriptwriter, Ligiah Villalobos, are women, and this could presumably account for the feminine perspective.
Moreover, like the two Esperanzas in Like Water for Chocolate and Santitos, but with a more Catholic-sounding name, Rosario also eventually finds her home to be in the United States, but unlike them, she achieves this together with her family. For week after week, on Sundays, Rosario had been calling her son from a public booth and she had been describing the surroundings for him. Right opposite the booth, she would say, is a pizza shop, and right next to it a laundry, and to the left hand side a mural, well known in Mexican and Chicano iconography as an utmost artistic representation of national identity. And it is this description of hers that existed also in her son's mind that he remembers when he is in Los Angeles, and that ultimately allows him to find her at the usual call time on the Sunday, since he and Enrique thoroughly search for this particular combination of places anywhere near all murals in Los Angeles. Anderson's theory on imagined communities is thus here pushed to its limits. It is the community between Mexico and the United States existing in the minds of the thirty odd million Mexican Americans and Mexicans living in the US and their relatives that is also giving shape to a really-existing cultural community that can sustain a sense of belonging and identity pretty much along the lines that traditional national identity used to. Moreover, like Anderson's national realm, it is a community grounded on technology, this time in the form of the telephone as much as on the image, on the basis of Rosario's description imagined by her son, but also and more crucially on the basis of what we might call image-capitalism, with the pizza shop described and then depicted in the film being an instance of the many multinational corporations across the border of both countries, partly financing the film through tieins at the same time as they make the encounter between Rosario and her son possible.
In sum, migration would seem to have finally accomplished an ever more progressive journey of representation, from the immigrant or the Chicano being The Man without a Fatherland to Mexican women immigrants being shown Under the Same Moon as their families regardless of political borders, and capable of negotiating their identity, notably as regards religion, in the process, without having to, as it were, 'sell out'. In the meantime, the Chicano and the Mexican immigrant have been humanised and their dignity has been returned to them, as they have gone from mere 'braceros', or spare arms, to full-blown supplements, fully human valuable additions to both the American and Mexican identity.
I would argue however that although there may be a grain of truth in this picture, a closer reading of the film yields rather different, more pessimistic conclusions. While there may be a female protagonist and a female director and scriptwriter, the story itself and the treatment of it could hardly be more patriarchal. What makes Rosario commendable, after all, is motherhood, and with the absent father, she enacts yet again one of the only two traditional subject positions for women in patriarchal Latin America, namely that of the virgin mother, the other option being that of the prostitute. (Hershfield 2001) To remain pure and a worthy figure she must renounce even Paco, the security guard in the compound where she works and who is hopelessly in love with her, however Mexican he may be. Moreover, among the American characters, it is also the one who is a mother that is more human and capable of transcending race, in that it is she who warns Rosario about the journey her son has embarked into to search for her. Rosario's other American female employer, childless, is arrogant and exploitative. And Rosario's Mexican younger friend, Martha, shown enjoying sexuality in a freer way, is not a mother. In addition, 'woman' is also objectified in the publicity stills for this film, which show a massive close-up of the woman's head that in one case occupies half the front cover of the DVD, while the two male figures of her son and Enrique are shown on the road below, full-bodied. 6 Moreover, the male-bonding story of the road movie is at least as important as the supposedly more feminine melodrama. Ultimately, the question also lingers whether the apparently progressive focus on a woman immigrant is not further contributing to the feminization of Mexico once again as in the gendered discourses that became common during NAFTA negotiations. For while male immigrants are in the US perceived as a potential threat and cause anxiety on miscegenation, women are perceived as vulnerable and have traditionally had a role as part of war spoils, thus it is the Mexican male, the absent father, that must be dispensed with in the film. And last but not least, Chicanos themselves are once again thoroughly derided, in that the only Chicano couple depicted in the film match the representations of Chicanos as culturally inferior individuals with a fake identity, who cannot even speak what is regarded as their language, Spanish, and who are trying to enter the human smuggling business by crossing babies through the border. More importantly, the narrative of the Mexican as having a place in the US, but this place being that of a second class citizen, is here not only suggested, as in Arau's film, but even naturalised, recruiting the moon itself to the effort. The potentially transformative role of the supplement is thus neutralised in this narrative. The relative box-office success of Under the same Moon, which was shown in 454 theatres in the US for 17 weeks and garnered slightly over USD $23,042,107 in the period, featuring number ten among the US top ten in April 2008, must then lie in its populist strand at a time when the Chicano production is also far less radical and moving towards the mainstream. 7 We might be Under the same Moon in a postnational translocality, but for Mexican immigrant women, Chicanos and Chicanas, it still looks like it is The Man without a Fatherland that has managed to retain the centre stage.