MY FAMILY/MI FAMILIA
A Milpa Grows in East L. A.
A film review by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez
Copyright 1995 Chronicle Features
In the movie, MY FAMILY/MI FAMILIA, a milpa grows in East Los Angeles; a cornfield where even that which dies--like fallen stalks of corn--feeds the living.
MY FAMILY, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, chronicles five generations of a Mexican family's experience in the United States. The Sanchez family includes "El Californio," an old uncle who was born in Los Angeles when it was still Mexico; Maria, the Mexican-American mother who is deported during anti-immigrant sweeps in the '30s; Isabel, a Salvadoran political refugee who marries into the family; and Chuco, a pachuco who is pursued by a river spirit. (In this movie, even the chairs have spirits.)
And unlike other Hollywood movies, Puerto Rican, Peruvian, Mexican and Chicano actors play Latinos.
Anyone from an immigrant family, or even a large family, should see a part of their own lives in this film. We did.
We saw our families who were here in the United States long before pilgrims or conquistadors: grandparents who crossed the border back and forth when there no Border Patrol; an imprisoned uncle, who, like the character Jimmy, seemed to bear all the wounds of being different for the entire family like the fallen corn, so the rest of us could flourish. Our family grew milpas.
We live in a society of divisions, of disintegrating families of races, and people divided into legal and illegal populations. MY FAMILY is about how one family withstands those divisions. It is not a Disney family.
When we were young, we went to movie theaters and drive-ins in Texas and California with names like the Isis and the Floral, where we saw ourselves through Mexico's golden age of cinema. We were complex. We laughed, sang, danced an loved through Mexican movie stars Maria Felix, Pedro Infante, Dolores del Rio, Tin Tan and Cantinflas.
Then, we were heroes. We imagined ourselves in Spanish. But as we relied more and more on the English-only films of Hollywood, we were reduced to maids with thick accents, prostitutes and drug dealers. Hollywood reduced us to caricatures.
MY FAMILY is about a housekeeper and a gardener who, in the end, live a good life. At best in the mainstream media, these gardeners and housekeeper are reduced to Nannygate problems or cameo roles in the intrigues of the O. J. Simpson trial, and their sons appear handcuffed regularly in the nightly news.
For those of us who have grown up in the electronic village, films such as JFK become the medium of truth and social memory. It is not lost on Latin youth that they are rendered as the fearfully romantic antiheroes. They don't get the happy ending or even a happy continuum. They always die in the end.
Screenwriters Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, the husband and wife team who created EL NORTE, a movie about Guatemalan refugees, envisioned MY FAMILY as a moving Diego Rivera mural. Through his palette of indigenous themes, Rivera restored dignity to the Indians of Mexico.
MY FAMILY is part of a larger effort by Latinos to recover that dignity through film, documentaries and the written word. Latinos everywhere are recording a different memory of how we see ourselves, how we narrate ourselves and our place in America.
Other recently released films, such as AND THE EARTH DID NOT SWALLOW HIM, based on the book by Tomas Rivera about a migrant family, also speak to that collective memory of simply being human, rather than an anonymous entity whose name to some Americans, translates into "stranger" or "alien." Both movies are to be released around Cinco de Mayo (May 5).
"Films like these are about inserting ourselves into American history," say Rosa Linda Fregoso, a professor at the University of California at Davis, who wrote THE BRONZE SCREEN (U of Minnesota Press, 1993), a book on the Chicanas and Chincanos in film.
Sadly, as we celebrate 100 years of Hollywood, MY FAMILY is one of the few movies with a big-name backer. Many in the industry are looking at it as a screen test for future movies on Latinos. As one fan noted, it took 100 years to make.
By the way, cornfields still grow in East L.A. And the broken and fallen corn still feed the new.
Chronicle Features, San Francisco RELEASE DATE: On or After April 28,1995 LATINO SPECTRUM by Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales
(Copyright Chronicle Features, 1995)
NOTE: LATINO SPECTRUM is a nationally syndicated column and is reproduced with the permission of the authors. For more information, contact R. Rodriguez at (915) 593-2387 e-mail XRoberto@aol.com or your local newspaper.
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