Hanging out with the Homegirls? Allison Anders's 'Mi Vida Loca.'
(Race in Contemporary American Cinema: Part 4)

What happens when you wrap a white girl's story in brown girl's drapes? You get Allison Anders's Mi Vida Loca. I must admit, this film has been difficult for me to review. Difficult because its gender politics are great, because it's the best mainstream film on Chicano gangs. Difficult because of Mi Vida Loca's verisimilitude, its attention to the details of everyday life, and its faithful rendition of the style, stance, posture, gestures, mannerisms, and speech of so many Pachucas-Cholas-Homegirls Ihave known throughout the years. Difficult also because the aspect I am celebrating, its daring and gritty realism, is so partial in its one-sided vision of 'la vida loca' (the crazy life, in gang parlance) or what I prefer to call 'la vida dura' (the hard life). Indeed, the film is a splendid contradiction.

Mi Vida Loca has the burden of being the first commercial film about girl gangs as well as the first mainstream film about Chicanas. I say 'burden' because a great deal is at stake when a cultural production is the first of its kind. Is it representative? It is realistic? Does it reproduce stereotypes? Is it commercially lucrative? In the film industry, a 'first of its kind' film can either open the door to more representations or shut it for years to come. And a great deal more is also at stake in this 'first of a kind' film because its director is white, while her subject matter is not.

In principle, I don't have a problem with whites making films about Chicanas. Indeed, Salt of the Earth, made by a white director, Herbert Biberman, is still the best feature film to date about Chicanas and Chicanos. The reason for this is that the makers of Salt of the Earth did what any responsible person making films about 'others' should do: they went to the community's location and made every effort to see the world through the eyes of Chicanas and Chicanos. To avoid being labeled a tourist, a non-Chicano should attend to the nuances and particularities of Chicano/a culture (as Biberman did); otherwise the film will lack cultural sensibility and specificity. The very least I expect from conscientious white film-makers is that they refrain from reproducing this country's power relations of racial inequality, and that they portray Chicanas and Chicanos as human beings who think and act. I would hope that white film- makers work against the demonization and degradation of Chicanos and Chicanas in U.S. popular culture.

Mi Vida Loca is as much about Anders as it is about Chicana gangs. She's a filmmaker who lets her own life experiences guide her narrative choices. Her much acclaimed Gas Food Lodging, a film about a single mother raising two teenage girls in a trailer park, is based on the filmmaker's combative relationship with her mother as well as her own experience as a single mother. Anders's idea for Mi Vida Loca came from ten years of living around Chicana homegirls.

Mi Vida Loca tells the tale of girl gang members from Echo Park, L.A. Focusing on ordinary Chicana homegirls with names like Blue Eyes, Giggles, and Whisper, the film features three interlocking stories orchestrated around the characters, Sad Girl and Mousie (Angel Aviles and Seidy Lopez). The girls are lifelong friends whose friendship ends when they both end up mothering babies by the same homeboy, Ernesto (Jacob Vargas). Mousie and Sad Girl's fatal showdown at a barrio vacant lot has a surprise resolution when Ernesto is gunned down by one of his despised customers, a white female druggie.

From this point on, the central plot is concerned with relationships among young women. This sisterhood saga unfolds as a story of the struggle and survival of single teenage mothers in a barrio where boyfriends, fathers, and husbands end up in prison or in the grave. These are fiercely independent young women whose lives are marked by camaraderie, affection, betrayal, and, most of all, female solidarity. Intersecting the main storyline are two other subplots worth mentioning. The first features an epistolary romance between La Blue Eyes and El Duran while he is in prison. The second subplot revolves around Ernesto's obsession with a lowrider truck and what happens to it after his death.

Mi Vida Loca offers viewers many of the familiar Hollywood images of gangs -tattoos, graffiti, drive-bys, poor barrio homes, drug dealing, gang rivalries, gang banging, and so on. But there are other aspects of Mi Vida Loca that differ from the gangxploitation genre. In commercial films, gang violence is so heavy-handed to the point of titillation that it has become a staple of the gang genre. In these films, viewers will see a great deal of macho bravado with the usual fare of violence between rival gangs or between gangs and police. This on-screen violence is more often glamorized and emptied of its tragic social and human consequences. To Anders's credit, she refuses the cinematic strategy of glamorizing violence, depicting instead gang violence off-screen. She does, however, show its tragic human consequences.

In the social-realist tradition of Latin American Third Cinema, Anders mixes 'real' gang members into the film's cast. One of the main characters, Whisper, is played by Nelida Lopez, an actual member of the Echo Park Locas. Anders even followed the lead of one of her favorite films, Salt of the Earth, by welcoming community gang members to comment and advise her on the script. Their consultation dealt primarily with questions of style, music, and speech. Whereas Salt of the Earth was altered considerably because of community input, Anders merely made minor changes to the script. In the original script, Anders had depicted members of the same gang fighting over a lowrider truck. Responding to the objection of her consultants, Anders changed the script to fighting between rival gang members.

Formally, the film is shot in a style Anders calls "romantic realism," where camera movement follows character's emotions. The film's cinematographer, Rodrigo Garcia (son of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) effectively mixes low angle close-ups with opalescent and luminous shots. Into its episodic narrative structure, Anders weaves a tapestry of music, death, and melancholy, attending meticulously to the stylistic nuances of Chicano gang culture. Like Chicano cultural producers (Jose Montoya, Edward James Olmos, Luis Valdez), Anders estheticizes a lifestyle which has, for too long, been demonized by mainstream culture. In contrast to her male counterparts, Anders focuses on a much ignored segment of Chicano gang culture: the female members. Yet for all its esthetic and narrative innovations, something is terribly wrong with this picture.

Professional film critics have trashed Mi Vida Loca on political and ideological grounds. Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas pointed to the filmmaker's paternalism as well as to the fact that the film confirms negative stereotypes of Chicanas as welfare dependents ("The Road to 'Mi Vida Loca' Paved with Good Intentions," LA Times, July 22, 1994). Pat Dowell further blasted the film's nihilism, its downbeat resolution ("Poor Creatures," In These Times, August 8, 1994). It should come as no surprise that a Chicana critic would launch the usual 'negative stereotype' accusation. Writing on behalf of the "Latino" community, Rose Arrieta disapproved of the film for playing "on every stereotype 'mainstream' America thinks about urban gang life," and urged the portrayal of Chicanos as something else besides gang members ("Outside Looking In," San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 3, 1994). In the U.S. as well as abroad, others faulted the film for depicting teenagers without ambition, "drifting downward into chaos and dead-end lives" (see Susan Gerhard, "True Colors," San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 3, 1994).

I am less concerned with most of these objections, as hopelessness and helplessness is in fact pervasive among inner-city youth. Therefore, unless we deal directly with the very serious structural problems of the inner city, a positive or uplifting ending to a gang film is like empty moralizing or, better yet, like ice water for chocolate.

In my view, the more substantive critiques of the film come from the gang members themselves who have taken issue with the filmmaker's depiction of their lives. Among Chicana homegirls' objections to the film: 1) Homegirls don't get pregnant from the same guy, they have more respect than that; 2) A homeboy does not obsess over a lowrider truck at the expense of his kids; 3) Rival gangs fight over turf, never over a car (see Jill Sharer, "Gang girls on attitude, reality and Mi Vida Loca," LA Weekly, July 2228, 1994; Liela Cobo-Hanlon, "Another Side of the 'Crazy Life'" LA Times, July 21, 1994).

At the San Francisco Film Festival's screening of the film in 1994, during the Q & A session, the following comments by a member of Oakland's "Da Crew" girls gang were directed at Anders: "The movie was really down...Why didn't you show the girls really throwing down? And why did they throw down over a boy? You know, we wouldn't throw down over a guy."

These may seem to be minor quibbles, but the critiques by Chicana homegirls underscore, albeit in a coded form, the central problem of the film. Chicana gang members did not object to how they were portrayed as much as they objected to the details of their narratives. Unlike any other mainstream film (except perhaps, American Me), Anders got the 'form' of gang culture right. What she sorely missed was its 'substance.'

Anders's fictional narrative has little to do with the life and culture of Chicanas. In fact, the film's three interlocking stories are about Allison Anders. A victim of unrequited love, Anders transformed her own autobiographical tale into the epistolary affair between La Blue Eyes and El Duran. A short script by a former boyfriend, Kurt Voss, inspired the lowrider truck segment. The plotline of two homegirls becoming pregnant from the same guy is taken from a story that her daughter heard on the streets. In this way, Chicana homegirls are the pretexts for Allison Anders's own fantasies.

She misses the reality that the sisterhood so eloquently captured in the film is not created in a vacuum. If you are going to tell a story about Chicanas, you've got to understand that their survival in the barrio depends heavily on the kinship of older, compassionate, and understanding women who have also resisted and survived 'la vida dura.' For some reason, Anders chose to portray Chicana teenagers as self-sufficient, having little interaction with adults. Untold is the story of the elaborate support network of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts who visit them in jail, bail them out, and help deliver, feed, and take care of babies. She also trivializes the warfare among Chicano inner-city youth. The battle between Chicano gangs is over the control of turf and scarce economic resources, not lowrider trucks.

A certain type of voyeurism is at work here in the manner in which the filmmaker captures the style of Chicana homegirls, but not the fabric of their lives. Why did she spend so much time as an ethnographer in the barrio, consulting with gang members to make the dialog and situations as realistic as possible, if she was not concerned with getting it right? At the San Francisco screening of Mi Vida Loca, Anders told the audience: "My goal was to humanize people who don't get represented on the screen."

One way to humanize people who don't get represented on the screen is to make sure you tell the story from their own point of view, to insure you depict their reality through their own eyes. Anders got the particularities of the Chicana homegirl experience right. What she missed was their perspectives.

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