While perusing the foreign movie section of Hollywood Video, I expected to find titles that were, well…foreign. It was no surprise to see a veritable buffet of international films. Horror from Japan, romance from India, and comedy from Israel were represented both sides of a single aisle in the store.
That was precisely why it strange to see a movie like Mi Vida Loca, hailing from the distant land of Southern California, would be sharing a shelf with DVDs from Germany and Spain.
The 1994 movie told the story of a Latino gang in Los Angeles’ Echo Park, focusing on the rivalry between two former friends who fall love with the same drug-dealing boyfriend.
In truth, I remembered laughing almost the whole way through the first time I saw it. As the homegirls of Echo Park struggled with their love lives, making ends meet and staying united for survival, the characters served up lines like, “You told me I was your only ruca for life” and “…prison made her think she’s Miss Goody Two-shoes.”
But the issue at hand was that Mi Vida Loca was filmed in the United States and featured American actors reading an English script. What exactly is so foreign about that?
The line between what is classified as foreign versus non-foreign got blurrier as I looked around. There was Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the independent California film Quinceñea and a comedy special called The Latino Locos featuring Hispanic performers from across the country.
Perhaps the reason for this system of categorization lies in the definition of the word “foreign.” Certainly a film made in another country is classifiable as foreign. Apocalypto, a movie that was filmed in Mexico to the script in Mayan, was seated in the foreign film section. But in that case, where are the movies in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all of which were shot in New Zealand?
Maybe it could work as an umbrella term to categorize foreign language movies. Ladrón que roba a ladrón is a Spanish-language movie written by McAllen native Jose “JoJo” Henrickson, filmed in California and distributed by Lionsgate. Its all-Spanish script seems to be what landed it in the foreign section rather than “Action.” Yet Gibson’s other blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, the dialogue of which was in Latin and was filmed in Italy, is not present company in the aisle.
If it were agreed upon that meeting one or both of these criteria would be just cause for shelving American movies alongside titles from Israel and Japan, another question remains to be answered: why are films that were shot in the United States and feature American actors reading an English script like Mi Vida Loca and Quinceñera both in the foreign section?
Maybe it’s the crispy bangs, dark lip liner and accented English that dismisses it as “foreign,” anything not exactly resembling the America portrayed in the movies at Cinemark 16 as not a legitimate slice of American life.
It is a cast of Latino actors and actresses sans Edward James Olmos. Even if the cast aren’t all Oscar nominees, Mi Vida Loca is about a part of American culture that doesn’t get the spotlight in mainstream movies unless an inner-city youth harboring dreams of taking his or her dance moves from the club to a performance school audition is at the center of the plot.
The characters that take the center of Mi Vida Loca stand on the sidelines as sharp-witted friends, maids and gangbangers in other Hollywood productions.
They are foreign not because of country or language. They are a foreign culture in American film.
What for so long seemed to me like window into the film culture of other counties now doubles as a cinematic border check point with American movies somehow unable to prove their citizenship, defined by the color of the actors’ skin before the content of the storyline.
Hispanic Heritage Month is now over and the national the fanfare celebrating Hispanic culture in the United States will likely die down until next September, but the fact remains that Latino films will sit in the foreign section all year.
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