2021/11/24 by Thea Pitman, Pitman, Thea
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Latin American and Latino Studies #Mi vida loca #Spanish Culture and Identity #authenticity-membership-test #chicano identity
paper · doi:10.23692/imex.2.2
openalex publication_date 2021/11/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
pp. 12-30. While nuanced and sensitive non-essentialist theorisations of Chicano identity have been put forward by key critics working in the field, these same critics still struggle, on occasion, to disentangle themselves from having recourse to essentialist arguments in their own work. The case that I examine here constitutes a prime example of this problem within Chicano critical discourse. It concerns the debates, in Chicano intellectual circles, over definitions of ‘Chicano cinema’, focalised via an examination of a film that has provoked a quite particular polemic in this respect: non-Chicana director Allison Anders’s Mi vida loca / My Crazy Life (1994). My discussion of Anders’s film will centre on its reception with a range of professional film critics, mostly Chicana/os, as well as reports on the reaction of a sample group of the film’s subjects – Chicana gang members – to their representation on screen. It will examine the factors at play in the way it has been received, and expose evidence of recursive essentialism in such arguments where apparent.