Chicano Popular Culture Analysis

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When studying Chican@ Art & Culture, I learned many new perspectives and ideas over the Mexican-American individual and as a culture. Some of the concepts I grasped with my understanding is that the Chican@ was discriminated throughout history by Anglo-Americans. I gained knowledge of the hardships, discrimination, and experiences they faced. It challenged me to take in those viewpoints and how showed me how they made the ultimate sacrifices for the culture. Before actually comprehending what makes the Chicano identity, I thought that Chicano was just a mixed race. But as I began to read and study the texts in this course, I reinforced my view while acquiring information that was indeed significant for me as a Mexican-American to know and should …show more content…
Tatum describes how the American film production put forth prejudice ideas over the Mexican-American culture. These ideas included preconceived opinions such as that all Mexicans are involved in gangs, drink and smoke, go to prison, families are unorganized, are people’s assistants or servants, etc. Tatum explains that during the 1910s and 1970s Mexicans were incorrectly portrayed through certain movie genres. First the Castilian Caballero films characterized the male Mexican to be a hero and later introduced the Cisco kid who was a romantic male who usually attained a beautiful woman in the end. Dark Lady films was a popular genre because it pictured dark-complex skinned Mexican women allowing them to transition into mainstream actresses, but at a cost to lose their Latin identity. Too, the Greaser-Gangster attitude was just another biased Hollywood description on the Chicano race. Hollywood films illustrated the “greaser’s” personality as deceitful, untrustworthy, ugly, rude, oily, and even disloyal to his companions. Tatum states (2001), “…the greaser-gangster protagonist was portrayed as shifty, untrustworthy, treacherous, ugly, crude, oily, and totally disloyal even to other gangsters” (p. 53). These genres are just a few false personas shown by American film productions in creating the racialization that is now known to Mexican-Americans and the
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