Chicanx Consciousness

Chicanx filmmakers are consciously aware of negative reproductions or unproductions (meaning no representations) of themselves in mainstream motion pictures. It is a fact that Chicanx are underrepresented in mainstream cinema. Although Hispanics represent 18% of the U.S. population and contribute 21% percent of U.S. box office revenue, only about 5% percent of actors in top Hollywood films are Hispanic (Ryan 2017). Hispanic representation behind the camera is just as dismal. Unsurprisingly, Latinas in the U.S. are near non-existent in the director’s chair (Smith, Choueiti, & Pieper 2018). In order to provide a counter-narrative or to fill the absence of Chicanx on screen and behind the camera, Chicanx filmmakers are called on, now more than ever, to produce films through any means necessary. By doing so, we may advance our own knowledge about ourselves, our culture, experiences, and history, which may contribute to a new generation of Chicanx films. 

Working to counter these statistics, in this chapter I aim to provide a Chicanx framework for producing the next generation of resilient Chicanx cinema. I discuss lessons that I’ve learned from my own experiences as an independent Chicanx filmmaker and educator. I propose a rasquachando con la comunidad Chicanx filmmaking framework for producing Chicanx and social justice-oriented moving images to combat an elite Hollywood system that has traditionally kept Chicanx out or in subservient roles in and beyond the film industry. Chicanx and other people of color in general continue to be silenced voices in film in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Dismantling systemic racism in the film industry is especially important in post-Trumpism and the resurgence of violent white-supremacist attacks on Black and brown people. Therefore, instead of waiting to be included, we have to take it upon ourselves to make change happen and to increase representation and credit for BIPOC communities in film. For that reason, I’m putting forth Chicanx filmmaking as a rhetorical invention that should be used to combat oppression, both in the film industry and beyond, during a time of increased hateful and discriminatory acts. The rasquachando con la comunidad framework I propose calls on Chicanx filmmakers and other economically and racially disadvantaged people to create our own opportunities for film production with, for, and about racially and economically disadvantaged communities. We must remain resilient and meet all challenges with creativity using rasquache methods (Ybarra-Frausto 1989). By being resilient and creative, we are better prepared to recognize opportunities for producing our own work.

To illustrate rasquachando con la comunidad, in this chapter I will discuss three projects: my short film Mariposa and first feature-film Ochoa, as well as my graphic novel A.W.O.L. to illustrate the ways in which I’ve used this method in my own creative work as a filmmaker, playwright, and comic book author. In my nepantlera (Anzaldúa 2015) role as an artist and activist, I’m also an educator teaching filmmaking and Chicano Cinema to students at the community college and university in my local community. This filmmaking testimonio is directed at Chicanx filmmakers and artistas working to shift and increase representations of racially and economically disadvantaged communities in and beyond the United States. 

Discovering Chicanx Cinema

I was born and raised in the El Paso, Texas, Mexico/U.S. border region, in a large working-class Mexican family. I was the first and only person in my family to go to college. I can remember going to an actual movie theatre a handful of times. I was a teenager before computers and smartphones. Fortunately, the one movie I got to see as a teenager on the big screen and the movie that inspired me to want to make movies was the 1987 film La Bamba directed by Luis Valdez. This Chicanx film depicted a Mexican teenager who quickly rose to fame as a young rock ‘n‘ roll star. I was fascinated by the story of a young Mexican migrant farmworker who “made it big.” This is the first time I remember being conscious of seeing a brown-skinned American like me on the big screen. I had not experienced this connection with film before. It made me think about all the other movies I’d seen and how brown people like me are rarely present in the movies accessible to me and the rest of my community. I imagined that white people had not experienced this eye-opening realization because images that look like themselves have never been absent from the Hollywood big screen. This experience of connecting with film was personal and emotional. For one, I learned about a Chicano rocker I had never heard of before, so it served as a history lesson, one I never learned about in school. It was emotional because as quick as I learned about a new Chicano hero, I also learned he died young in a plane crash. I experienced something similar in high school when my Tejana/Chicana hero Selena Quintanilla was murdered by her fan club president. The film Selena (1997) directed by Gregory Nava was another visual testimony that documented Chicanx history. I remember watching Ritchie Valens’ story and sitting in a dark theatre with my family and seeing their eyes glued to the screen. I decided right then and there that I was going to be a storyteller as a means for producing my own stories and intervention for mainstream capitalist structures. Eventually, I went on to graduate school and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film from Columbia University in the city of New York. I learned how expensive filmmaking can be, especially if you are not working within the Hollywood industry where many BIPOC people and independent filmmakers are left out. Although Ritchie Valens and Selena got the Hollywood treatment, there are many more stories that have been ignored and unproduced by Hollywood. Chicanx stories must be told. Therefore, rasquachando con la comunidad is a method for making Chicanx films for independent filmmakers who are determined to get their films created against all odds.     

Rasquachismo Method/ologies

In my own filmmaking, I draw on rasquachismo method/ologies to bring together any available resource that will help me tell a story. Rasquachismo is a term advanced by Chicano scholar Dr. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (1965) to describe a “resilience and resourcefulness [that] spring from making do with what’s at hand (hacer render las cosas)” (5). An example of rasquachismo from my childhood was my dad using an abandoned bathtub for a flowerbed in the front yard, in other words saving every scrap and using every resource available to make something. Ybarra-Frausto (1965) describes rasquachismo as a Chicano sensibility, explaining that it is “an understanding of a particular aesthetic code in any particular community and it comes out of the experience of living in that community.” The inventiveness of rasquachismo stems mostly from having a lack of financial resources that pushes communities to invent new ways of being and to innovate new uses for tools and technologies. Therefore, I argue, rasquachismo may also be used as a tool and means of creating and distributing cinema that widens our perspectives. As Amalia Mesa-Bains, an artist and writer, explains, “in rasquachismo, the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least… one has a stance that is both defiant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials… The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo” (2003). This idea of not letting anything go to waste and making art out of scraps is at the core of my approach to Chicanx filmmaking. Rasquachando con la comunidad is making with your community as a political framework of cultural activism that extends beyond film. The racist attacks on Black and brown people in the year 2020 have revealed that systemic racism in mainstream industries is alive and working to further oppress racially and economically disadvantaged people. 

Seeing positive images of ourselves in all media affects our cultural affirmation. Because Hollywood is the dominant filmmaking system, the handling of the Chicanx images by Hollywood, which impacts the world’s view of Chicanx, is a concern for Chicanx people. In the film industry, when you sign a talent or crew release form, you give that company ownership of your likeness, which is your image and voice. Chicanx need to own their likeness in order to speak for themselves in the media. The opportunity now exists for Chicanx voices, like mine, to be given a platform; we’re especially hearing this opportunity through the ubiquitous nature of social media. The de-marginalization of voices is becoming front and center in our American culture, and Chicanx films provide an oculus to our community. As Camplis argued “We have the capacity to invent our own cinematic expression” (1975, 335). Just like Luis Valdez’ production of a Chicanx film empowered me as a kid because I felt a strong connection to the Chicanx characters depicted and the Chicanx story being told, future Chicanx film productions may inspire Chicanx generations to come, as we collectively develop new frameworks for shifting the ways our communities are represented in the media. 

While Hollywood is glaring in its omission of the Chicanx population, there is a wealth of Chicanx filmmakers who aren’t looking at Hollywood only to produce and distribute their work, and I am one of them. I am a Chicana filmmaker who has been greatly influenced by the work of my predecessors who have paved the way, including Efrain Gutierrez, Luis Valdez, Lourdes Portillo, Gregory Nava, Edward James Olmos, Ramón Menéndez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sylvia Morales, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Moctesuma Esparza, Chon Noriega, Jeff Valdez, Robert Rodriguez, Ligiah Villalobos, Patricia Riggen, and Aurora Guerrero, as well as many others. I continue to be inspired by my students in the El Paso/Juarez borderplex region who I believe will be the next generation of resilient filmmakers.

My short film Mariposa (2006) is an example of rasquachismo method/ologies, which may serve to inform an action plan for practitioners who may want to make films but who may also think it’s too difficult to tell stories without a Hollywood-type of budget. I made Mariposa while I was a film student at Columbia University in the School of the Arts, where I earned my MFA degree. Shot on Super 16mm film and produced in 2005, Mariposa is a short film about a young Chicana who gets kidnapped by a corrupt cop and his girlfriend in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

My experience making Mariposa demonstrates rasquachando con la comunidad because the production from beginning to end involved working with my community, my neighbors, my students, and academic institutions in our region to tell this story. I’m interested in conveying what it is like to be involved in power dynamics as both subject and agent using filmmaking as my medium. I blend my art with politics, and in doing so I draw on my experiences to produce narratives of people of color living in America. 

El Paso, Texas is minutes away from where one of the largest femicides in recent history occurred. According to Amnesty International, since 1993, more than 370 young women and girls have been murdered in the cities of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico – at least a third suffering sexual violence – without the authorities taking proper measures to investigate and address the problem. Incidents of domestic violence and femicide rose on the border of Juarez and El Paso as more women entered the workforce in Juarez. NAFTA brought more factories to this border region, creating new job opportunities for women outside of the home (Arriola 2007, 603). A study conducted in 2008 by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte found that 30.4% of women and girls murdered in Juarez from 1993–2007 were killed by men who were close to them (Monarrez Fragoso 2008, 80). Between 1993 and 2005, the year that Mariposa was filmed, there were over 400 unsolved murders of women in Juarez. This billion-dollar trafficking industry also targets women in El Paso, Texas. In 2016, U.S. federal agents said during a conference that victims of human trafficking in the El Paso, Texas area are U.S. citizens — mostly young girls forced into prostitution by traffickers who also are U.S. citizens (Figueroa 2016). After hundreds of deaths, these unsolved murders sent the message to Mexican women and Chicanas on the border that their lives did not matter, and that if you go missing and are found murdered, nothing will be done about it. 

I distinctly remember as a young woman seeing images on television of women’s murdered bodies being pulled out of the desert. However, in 1996, when I moved across the country to attend the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, I no longer saw the familiar story in the news, even though these murders were and are still prominent. It was as if the situation was not being reported outside of news outlets in the border region. Until one day, when I saw a documentary by Lourdes Portillo. Her film Señoritas Extraviadas (2001) provided an insider perspective on the murders of women in Juarez. It was a side of the story that I had never heard before, featuring an interview with a Mexican woman who survived being kidnapped in Juarez and who then lived to tell her story through the camera lens of a Chicanx filmmaker. 

I was a theatre student at the time in Minnesota. Having been inspired by Lourdes Portillo, and after gaining experiences writing and publishing an award-winning dramatic play called Father’s Shadow/Sombra del Padre (Dramatic Publishing 2000), I wrote a play called Escaping Juarez, which told the story of a young Mexican woman (Mariposa) who travels from a small town in Chihuahua to the city of Juarez looking for work in the factories. A fish out of water, she unknowingly befriends a human trafficker, a woman named Gemma who is working with her boyfriend named Juarez, a corrupt city cop. Mariposa gets kidnapped by the couple and the drama unfolds as we witness Gemma and Juarez preparing to murder Mariposa, making it clear that they are selling her for profit. The power dynamics in this horrific drama are negotiated between three characters; the prey, the kidnapper, and the kidnapper’s girlfriend who aids him. In attempting to understand the real femicide that was happening, I wanted to portray both the ideology of the kidnappers as well as the culture that they were part of, namely Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. 

In dramatizing (through a play) what was happening back home on the border, I quickly realized that many people in the east coast and Midwest did not know about this situation on the Mexico/US border and my hometown in the El Paso region. What I thought was common knowledge was not. In discussions with the audience after several staged performances of the play, people often asked, “What can we do about this?” In part to provide an answer to that question, as I enrolled in film school after producing my play, I used the opportunity to turn my play into a short film to complete an assignment in one of my film courses. We were asked to adapt a short play into a film. Following rasquachismo method/ologies, rather than pay a playwright or publisher royalties to adapt a short play, I decided to make do with what I already had. I adapted my own original play Escaping Juarez to the renamed Mariposa. It took me a year to raise about $40,000 to pay for the 16mm film rolls, equipment rentals, crew members, and post-production such as film development and color correction. Musical artist Kemo the Blaxican allowed me to use his music for free for this film, thanks to one of my producers Brenda Chavez who reached out to Kemo. Fundraising included a combination of my mom making enchiladas to sell Mexican plates of food, an art auction at a cousin’s local business in El Paso, writing grants, soliciting monetary donations from community members, and I was awarded the James McNamara Family Creative Arts Grant in 2005. Once the budget was in place, I filmed the project in my community of Chaparral, New Mexico, a colonia outside of El Paso, Texas. I recruited locals to assist on the production crew and to be actors. I had a handful of people not from El Paso help out who I met while in film school, including two of the lead actors Daniel Irizarry and Keyla Wood, and cinematographer Travis Petty who I met on a classmate’s film shoot in Dallas, Texas. My mom cooked and fed my cast and crew. Neighbors provided housing for my actors. Once the filming was done, I went back to NYC to edit the film and to complete my graduation requirements. I submitted the film to many student film festivals across the country and it is now available for free on YouTube and IMDB.com. Mariposa won awards such as Best Student Film Jury Award at the International Latino Film Festival San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. On the east coast, I recall audience members in Washington, D.C. having a similar reaction to audiences of the play production. Transforming the play into a short film required that I leverage new means of production to tell the same story, allowing that story to reach new audiences and bring awareness to important issues through a Chicanx perspective. The film Mariposa was a way for me to both draw awareness to the violent situation experienced by women in the borderland and to reclaim the ways in which these women were represented in the media. Although the film may not be of “high production” value, sharing the story through this medium allowed me to reach broader audiences and bring awareness to the violence that women in my hometown have and continue to experience. 

Framing Ochoa

Because of my positive experience making a short film, I decided to attempt making a feature film, which in the film industry is a moving picture longer than fifty minutes. My short film Mariposa is approximately fourteen minutes long. Knowing that it cost about $40,000 to make this short film, I knew making a longer film would be just as expensive if not more. Therefore, I used the same rasquachando con la comunidad method for my first feature film attempt Ochoa in 2010. Ochoa takes place in a border city on the Mexico/U.S. border, where a Chicana soldier leaves the military without permission and races against time to save her kidnapped brother. By portraying this powerful Chicana soldier going “AWOL” to save her brother’s life, this film further illustrates the struggles and strengths of my borderland community, while simultaneously illustrating the El Paso region as a complex and extensive metropolis. 

Fresh out of film school and armed with a script, I took my learning back to my community and filmed most of Ochoa in my hometown of Chaparral, New Mexico. Because I had very little budget for this film and in true rasquachando con la comunidad filmmaking style, I enlisted diverse members of my community in Chaparral and each played a major role. As a result, my neighbors who I grew up with allowed me to film in their places of business, their homes and on their properties, to use their vehicles and horses, and also acted as extras throughout the film. The late Jimmy Bowen, who owned the nearby 88,000-acre Bowen Ranch, allowed me to film on his property at several locations, including a ranch home called the Rock House. He also let me borrow his personalized 18-wheeler called “The Little Line” and a cherry picker. Below is a picture of “The Little Line.”

My other neighbor, John Colquitt, took me location scouting on his property, showing me his horses, a reservoir, farm animals, a barn, and a ranch house. He allowed my crew to station ourselves at the ranch house while we filmed scenes inside and outside the barn, the house, and the reservoir. He also gave me permission to film at the cemetery, which he also owns. The family of the late Dolores Wright, a longtime resident of Chaparral who also represented us politically allowed me to film inside their estate. Since I was a kid, Ms. Wright would continuously sponsor my school activities with some monetary donations. And finally, I also filmed scenes at the local Mexican-owned La Central Bakery and the St. Thomas More Catholic Church, where many members of the congregation acted as the priest and extras in a scene. 

To fundraise for the film Ochoa, I delivered and sent out hundreds of sponsorship packets and proposals to major businesses in El Paso, Texas. The only monetary donation I was able to raise came from a successful Chicano businessman Raymond Palacios, president of BRAVO Chevrolet Cadillac in Las Cruces, who gave me a check for $5,000. One of my students introduced me to him at an event in El Paso. Mr. Palacios also gave us access to his sports cars and SUV vehicles for use in the film. This independent filmmaking attempt was truly made possible because of local supporters—white, Chicano, and Mexican—who simply wanted to back a Chicanita with good grades from their own barrio. I learned that raising money as a student is easier than trying to raise money when you are not a student. For example, the James McNamara Family Creative Arts Grant was for students only.

Making a feature film means working for a longer period of time than a short film. We filmed Mariposa in about seven days. For Ochoa, my crew shot for a total of about twenty days in the middle of the hot summer. All of the actors were local and many of them were first time film actors. Through my faculty position at the University of Texas at El Paso, I also sought production support. As a result, the over 80% Chicanx crew was made up of students enrolled in a special topics course called FILM 4340 Film Studies, in which I was given the opportunity to teach and offer hands-on production training. There were also some student volunteers from El Paso Community College, where I obtained permission to film a few scenes at the Transmountain campus in northeast El Paso. I was also an adjunct faculty there at the time and had the support of colleagues, such as professor Angelina Arellanes-Núñez, who assisted during the audition process and hosted a private screening of a rough cut during post-production. Local community members made up the cast and served as production associates helping to secure food and other donations. One of my producers, who also served as an actor in the film, Cindy Miles, did an amazing job securing food from restaurants in El Paso. We also had a Fort Bliss soldier on set during the military scenes consulting us on correct military protocol. It truly was a major volunteer and rasquachando con la comunidad effort. 

In the end, though, despite all this effort, the film Ochoa needed more time for development, as well as more funding, as I realized that the film did not do justice to the action film adventure genre I was striving for. After getting so many people in my community to donate their time, talents, and assets, I was initially disappointed with how the film turned out, and I could have very easily classified our collective efforts as a failure, but I reminded myself of the initial intention, which was to bring my film education back to my community. In return, this community-based learning experience gave my students and my community an opportunity to be part of a feature film production, my students earned an official grade, Chaparral gained new visitors and attention, and one of my favorite moments was when my lead actor, a kickboxer who had never acted before, shared how much the experience transformed her. Not wanting this material to completely go to waste and drawing on my rasquachismo method/ologies, instead of giving up on the film completely, I decided to transform my film into another genre entirely. It was at this point that I decided to team up with my husband Ronnie Dukes, a comic book artist, and together we adapted the screenplay into a graphic novel. Resilient storytelling is at the core of being a rasquache filmmaker and making art with your community against all odds. This is what led to Ochoa being adapted into a graphic novel and with a different title, A.W.O.L. In “making do” and rasquachando con la comunidad, I was able to pull together all the resources available to me and worked with my community to bring this project to fruition in a different form. Rather than moving images, my storyboards became the template for sequential art. 

Resilient Rasquache: A.W.O.L

Making Ochoa was a good filmmaking exercise, being my first-time filming for an extended period of time, about twenty-two days straight, and it definitely did not dissuade me from wanting to pursue a filmmaking career. Not wanting this to be a wasted effort and since I already had all the fragments and discards of the project, such as two sketchbooks full of storyboards I drew for the film version, I decided to recycle my material. This supports Amalia Mesa-Bains’ concept of aesthetic expression in rasquachismo where you make do with what you have. Much like an Oprah Winfrey “Aha!” moment, I had a “translation” moment. Gonzales (2018) argues “translation moments are the instances where multilingual communicators are pushed to think beyond the limitations of alphabetic languages and symbol systems, using any mode or resource available to make meaning.” Filmmaking is a visual art communication, as are graphic novels.

My husband Ronnie Dukes is an independent artist and illustrator. Prior to deciding to transform Ochoa into a graphic novel, Ronnie and I had not realized how our art practices are interdisciplinary. We’re both independent artists wanting to tell stories, me through my words, Ronnie through his visual art. In 2017, after 8 years of collaboration, Ronnie and I self-published the comic book version of the screenplay Ochoa and called it A.W.O.L. It is an over 100-page full color action-adventure graphic novel about a Chicanx soldier who disobeys military orders in order to find her missing brother who has been kidnapped in El Paso, Texas, in the Mexico/US borderland region. El Paso is home to Fort Bliss, one of the largest military installations in the U.S. My dad served in the Marine Corps. The presence of the military has always been an important part of our community, which Ronnie and I were able to further highlight in our graphic novel. 

We premiered the graphic novel A.W.O.L. at the 2017 El Paso Comic Con and received an overwhelmingly positive response. This project has given Ronnie and I the opportunity to provide comic book workshops and presentations to young people throughout El Paso, including at the El Paso Museum of Art. Below is an image of the A.W.O.L. graphic novel, showcasing the way that Ronnie was able to bring the story to life through this visual talent.

In addition to transforming Ochoa into graphics, A.W.O.L. has been translated into Spanish and Japanese, increasing the accessibility of the story while also continuing to leverage rasquachismo method/ologies by bringing together resources, talents, and people to tell important stories. A Japanese student at the local community college did the Japanese translation and a recent graduate at the local university did the Spanish translation. As a result, I was able to use and adapt Ronnie’s art to reach broader audiences with this work. Ronnie and I were invited to Tokyo Comic Con 2018 where we represented the Japanese edition of A.W.O.L. We received first-hand positive reviews from Japanese people in Japan about the wonderful Japanese translation and brilliant anime-inspired artwork. We gained new fans who shared that they knew of the U.S./Mexico border and Chicano culture. As a result, comic book fans in Japan received a first-hand positive experience with a Chicana and a Black man from America versus any stereotypes exported in American mainstream media. In rasquachando con la comunidad, I’m able to control the image and message in my storytelling. It was important for me to feature a Chicana protagonist, a hero for the next generation of BIPOC who yearn to see themselves on screen and in mainstream media. Rasquachando con la comunidad, then, is cultural activism beyond film. It is also a political framework as it gives us the opportunity to address systemic racism, oppression, and social injustice in our communities. A.W.O.L. addresses political corruption, poverty, and trafficking that we see in colonias along the U.S./Mexico border and how it impacts Chicanx families living in these environments. 

The rhetorical practices of Chicanx filmmaking then, as evidenced through the stories of Mariposa, Ochoa, and A.W.O.L., require the flexibility, adaptability, and collaboration embedded in rasquachismo method/ologies. This means that sometimes, shifting and using new modalities in our practice is necessary in order to tell our stories by all means necessary. As Gabriela Raquel Ríos clarifies, multimodality has been practiced in non-Western communities for decades, as “Indigenous peoples have historically used music, dance, theater, and other types of nontextual practices to make meaning, and we still do” (2015). When I failed to raise enough funds to make an action-driven, military adventure on the U.S.-Mexico border, I had to adapt my story into a form more accessible to me, which was the graphic novel version. This was multimodality not only through need, but through rasquachando con la comunidad. 

Rasquachando con la Comunidad

Community-based learning as defined by Delano-Oriaran is learning occurring in the community with the community (2015). As an educator, I teach rasquachando con la comunidad as an important work strategy for young filmmakers who will produce the next wave of Chicanx Cinema. As a film student, I learned that it takes a barrio to make Chicanx films, therefore I pass this lesson on to my students using the film set as the classroom. Community architect Emily Pilloton reminds us “learning environment does not have to mean classroom” (2018). This is a lesson that defines rasquachando con la comunidad. Making with the community is a powerful practice for all racially and economically disadvantaged communities. Consequently, making Chicanx cinema through rasquachismo method/ologies is a symbolic form of resilience as we insert ourselves as the subject, agent, and educator on screen, behind the camera, and in the spaces we learn from each other and create. Chicanx filmmakers, now more than ever, are called on to confront the glaring omission or misrepresentation of our community in Hollywood films. We must push beyond traditional practices dictated by Hollywood. Rasquachando con la comunidad is a direct affront to the Hollywood system. This is a sign of our present times. By knowing our history, we become critically aware of the work ahead of us. Chicanx filmmakers are a fragment of a larger whole that will not fade out.

Accepting this rasquache approach to storytelling requires understanding that it goes against the status quo and may be met with resistance. An argument that may be made against this method may only serve to delegitimize the experiences or views of Chicanx and other communities of resistance. Therefore, rasquachando con la comunidad serves as a guide to develop the critical consciousness of filmmakers and to empower them to examine their own lives and the society they are a part of so that they can discover and recognize ideologies that are working to further oppress racially and economically disadvantaged communities. 

Using rhetorical tools to be able to construct Chicanx films and counter Hollywood practices advances Chicanx filmmakers and the communities in which they reside. Henceforth, writing, producing, and delivering Chicanx films are necessary in order to entertain, educate, and advance Chicanx people and to reach mass audiences in the U.S. and beyond our borders for the purpose of producing images and stories that come from Chicanx, thus contributing to the next generation of resilient Chicanx Cinema.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Laura Gonzales and Isaac Ceniceros for their time and thoughtful comments and suggestions on various versions of this work.

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