Towards the end of his song, "Glamorous Glue," Morrissey, a native of Manchester, England, croons, "We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/London is dead, London is dead, London is dead/London is dead, London is dead, London is dead." Morrissey is of Irish descent but grew up in England, thus he understand the colonial occupation of land. For a white citizen of the United Kingdom to look towards Los Angeles, arguably the greatest social experiment in modern human history, for linguistic progress and proclaim the death of the English capital is quite radical and extraordinary. Morrissey's acknowledgement of Los Angeles (a nod to his rabid Chicana/o fan base) establishes Los Angeles as the new (multi)cultural center of the United States, replacing New York, (the Big Aguacate has triumphed over the Big Apple). New York, named after the Duke of York of England, now cedes linguistic and cultural authority to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula. A white man born into decadent privilege is overtaken by a Marian apparition harkening to the original brown Virgin, the Virgen de Guadalupe. Myopic male authority yields to woman of color wisdom. The Big Aguacate would be an appropriate moniker for Los Angeles for the etymological root of the word originates from Nahuatl, representing a re-indigenization of the Americas, a Reconquista through the tongue—both gastronomic (what white person does not devour Mexican cuisine, albeit the bastardized Chipotle version?) and linguistic, a gradual acceptance of Spanish as the de facto second language of the city. According to the Pew Hispanic Research Center, the City of Angels is home to nearly 10% of the country's Latina/o population, and Mexicans/Chicanas/os comprise two-thirds (Brown and Lopez). Because of our shared border, the numbers of Mexicans/Chicanas/os will always outnumber the populations of Latinas/os from other Latin American countries. Despite such demographic, linguistic, and gastronomic evidence of potential, the Chicanx population of Los Angeles finds itself at a crossroads—emerge to become the political, intellectual, and industry leaders of tomorrow or relegate itself to rote existences of mind-numbing, repetitive labor and consumption of plastic material goods. The film, Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, and the novel, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, by John Rechy, paint portraits of the dystopic latter path and describe a potential future of a Los Angeles resembling Johannesburg, South Africa, during apartheid. The texts' two protagonists, Blade Runner's Rick Deckard played by Harrison Ford, and Amalia Gómez represent the Freirian colonized mind, programmed to decommission the aspirations of replicants (Mexicans) escaping the chains of wage slavery.
I chose Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez for several reasons. Firstly, John Rechy, a child of the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border, is a Los Angeles transplant and given his past as a hustler on its streets is intimately familiar with the urban sexual sprawl. Los Angeles features prominently in many of his texts, as he confesses his fascination with the cityscape in the introduction of another one of his texts, Bodies and Souls, "'It always astounded him, this city of bodies and souls. He did not consider it the flippant land of the inherited clichés. To him [Los Angeles] was the most spiritual and physical of cities, a profound city which drew to it the various bright and dark energies of the country'" (Rechy ix). Secondly, although both the director and the writer of my chosen texts are men, Rechy's Amalia experiences the grittiness of the city through a woman's body, a woman's desires, and a woman's pain—more specifically and importantly, a Chicana navigating multiple subjectivities—a first world woman suffering third world oppressions. Amalia embodies the spirituality and physicality of Los Angeles. Lastly, Rechy's dark vision of a Chicana struggling to survive the day-to-day realities of the harsh cityscape mirrors the travails of waves of immigrants who negotiate similar situations, regardless of the fact that she was born in Texas; for Amalia, citizenship grants few privileges.
Amalia Gómez opens with the protagonist witnessing a miracle—a cross in the sky. Amalia convinces herself that the cross must be what she has been desiring, a heavenly sign validating her existence and actions. Throughout her "miraculous" day, Rechy weaves Amalia's traumatic memories of her childhood in the "Segundo Barrio" of South El Paso and on-again, off-again single motherhood in Los Angeles with her current experiences to paint a portrait of suffering and the development of a colonized mind. As a child mired in poverty, Amalia's mother, Teresa, conveys to her daughter their good fortune of not having to live in the squalor of Mexico (Rechy 16). Amalia's teachers and the church nuns force the yoke of colonization onto Amalia's shoulders, who attempts to resist. Later as a teen-ager, however, comes the ultimate betrayal. Teresa begins to resent Amalia when she realizes her husband desires his own daughter. Furthermore, the son of family friends rapes Amalia in an alley; her own parents dispute her veracity, forcing her to marry him. She escapes to the City of Angels to follow another man, yet he, like all the men in her life, treats her with little respect, and she must forge a meager subsistence for herself and her children. As her two sons and a daughter grow up, Amalia replicates patriarchy by favoring the older, heterosexual son who is in jail over her daughter and her younger, feminine son who are good students. Amalia's daughter accuses Amalia's current live-in boyfriend, Reynaldo, of trying to molest her. Amalia, like her own mother, doubts her story. When she discovers her younger son, Juan, is gay, Amalia disowns him and throws him out of the house. Societal racist misogyny and her childhood trauma force Amalia to become a petty tyrant who oppresses her own children. For how many Chicanas is Amalia an accurate trope? For example, Pearl Fernandez of the Antelope Valley has pleaded guilty to allowing her boyfriend to abuse and torture her young son, Gabriel, to death for acting effeminately (Garcia). Another petty tyrant is Lupe Moreno, infamous "Proud Chicana Minuteman," who actively campaigns against undocumented immigrants, even though she was once married to an undocumented immigrant, and Vivian Martinez of Orange County, another xenophobic activist who declares, "'We are not like them,' she said of undocumented Latinos" (Delson). Through the character of Amalia Gomez, Rechy illustrates the colonized mind from a Chicana's perspective, a dire warning for future Chicanx generations.
Ridley Scott released his neo-noir science fiction classic, Blade Runner in 1982, the start of the Reagan era, describing a bleak future in which multinational corporations genetically engineer their own race of expendable workers, "replicants" (code for Mexicans), for dangerous work in outer space colonies. Harrison Ford plays the role of Rick Deckard, a law enforcement agent known as "blade runners" charged with the task of decommissioning any replicant on Earth, as they are banned for fear of stealing work from "real" humans. Set in the early twenty-first century, Blade Runner recalls historical events such as the mass deportation of Mexicans and Chicanas/os from the U.S. during the Great Depression and the conflicting immigration policies of the Bracero Program and Operation Wetback. This is not the first anti-immigrant/anti-Mexican film in Scott's oeuvre. Scott's film, Alien, released in 1979, depicts an (illegal) alien invading a sovereign corporate ship that interrupts commerce by slaughtering its crew and impregnating each member who die once the alien offspring bursts from their stomachs. Alien evokes fears of Mexican women birthing hordes of children, thus eliciting the need to implement sterilization practices at hospitals in areas heavily populated with Mexican/Chicana women. Whether Scott, a British national, is calling attention to historical xenophobic policies or is warning his white brethren to beware of the hordes of Third World peoples, particularly women of color, invading sovereign First World Nations to leach resources from hard-working citizens can only be ascertained from an analysis of his complete body of work.
Blade Runner's protagonist, Rick Deckard, represents another colonized mind. Suffering from internal colonization, the blade runner seeks to deport/decommission all replicants from Earth. Unbeknownst to Deckard as he pursues the fugitive replicants is the fact that he too is a replicant, akin to a slave acting as an overseer. According to postcolonial theorists such as Albert Memmi and Paolo Freire, once a people have been colonized, they begin to identify with the colonizer, thus the formation of petty tyrants, colonized people granted limited power who treat other colonized people harsher than the colonizer. At one point in the film, Deckard is hanging for his life from a ledge and a replicant remarks, "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave." Deckard resigns from his blade running duties to live with Rachael, a replicant femme fatale who is unaware of her status as a replicant. Must a replicant (Mexican) adopt a false identity in order to escape the clutches of the State? Rachael's unawareness of her replicant identity conjures historical amnesia who must wear the mask of "real" humanity in order to escape termination. Mexicans, therefore, integrate more easily into this culture if they adopt Western values and practices and ultimately "forget" who they are. Why terminate Mexicans if their minds can be further colonized by the allure of a staid, plastic middle-class life as a reward for obedient servitude.
The City of Angels represents a microcosm of the hemisphere. An expanding working-class brown population is juxtaposed against a diminishing middle and wealthy white populace. The structural impediments instituted and supported by white supremacy account for much of the stagnation of the Chicanx/Latina/o population in this country. Additionally, internal colonization and its perpetuation continue to segment our community into "us vs. them." The Chicanx population of Los Angeles stands on the precipice of permanent wage enslavement with the possibility of escaping such a fate through the painfully difficult process of decolonization. Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez and Scott's Blade Runner describe dystopic realities where Chicanxs serve as a permanent underclass who exist to serve those in power—the State, the Church, the Corporation. Both works represent warnings of such an impending future. Do we heed Morrissey's lyrics and decolonize ourselves from our masters? Or are Chicanxs doomed to slavery and petty tyranny?
Works Cited
Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, and Veronica Cartwright. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. DVD.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, and Edward James Olmos. Warner, 1982. DVD.
Brown Anna and Mark Hugo Lopez. "Mapping the Latino Population, By State, County and City." Pew Hispanic Research Center. Pew Research Center. 29 August 2013. Web. 10 June 2015.
Delson, Jennifer. "Latinos Work to Shore up Border." The Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles Times. 14 August 2005. Web. 10 June 2015.
Garcia, Michelle. "Report: Couple Refuses Deal in Torture Case." The Advocate. The Advocate. 30 October 2014. Web. 10 June 2015.
Morrissey. "Glamorous Glue." HMV, 1992. CD.
Rechy, John. Bodies and Souls. New York: Grove, 2001. Print.
--. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. New York: Grove, 1991. Print.
I chose Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez for several reasons. Firstly, John Rechy, a child of the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border, is a Los Angeles transplant and given his past as a hustler on its streets is intimately familiar with the urban sexual sprawl. Los Angeles features prominently in many of his texts, as he confesses his fascination with the cityscape in the introduction of another one of his texts, Bodies and Souls, "'It always astounded him, this city of bodies and souls. He did not consider it the flippant land of the inherited clichés. To him [Los Angeles] was the most spiritual and physical of cities, a profound city which drew to it the various bright and dark energies of the country'" (Rechy ix). Secondly, although both the director and the writer of my chosen texts are men, Rechy's Amalia experiences the grittiness of the city through a woman's body, a woman's desires, and a woman's pain—more specifically and importantly, a Chicana navigating multiple subjectivities—a first world woman suffering third world oppressions. Amalia embodies the spirituality and physicality of Los Angeles. Lastly, Rechy's dark vision of a Chicana struggling to survive the day-to-day realities of the harsh cityscape mirrors the travails of waves of immigrants who negotiate similar situations, regardless of the fact that she was born in Texas; for Amalia, citizenship grants few privileges.
Amalia Gómez opens with the protagonist witnessing a miracle—a cross in the sky. Amalia convinces herself that the cross must be what she has been desiring, a heavenly sign validating her existence and actions. Throughout her "miraculous" day, Rechy weaves Amalia's traumatic memories of her childhood in the "Segundo Barrio" of South El Paso and on-again, off-again single motherhood in Los Angeles with her current experiences to paint a portrait of suffering and the development of a colonized mind. As a child mired in poverty, Amalia's mother, Teresa, conveys to her daughter their good fortune of not having to live in the squalor of Mexico (Rechy 16). Amalia's teachers and the church nuns force the yoke of colonization onto Amalia's shoulders, who attempts to resist. Later as a teen-ager, however, comes the ultimate betrayal. Teresa begins to resent Amalia when she realizes her husband desires his own daughter. Furthermore, the son of family friends rapes Amalia in an alley; her own parents dispute her veracity, forcing her to marry him. She escapes to the City of Angels to follow another man, yet he, like all the men in her life, treats her with little respect, and she must forge a meager subsistence for herself and her children. As her two sons and a daughter grow up, Amalia replicates patriarchy by favoring the older, heterosexual son who is in jail over her daughter and her younger, feminine son who are good students. Amalia's daughter accuses Amalia's current live-in boyfriend, Reynaldo, of trying to molest her. Amalia, like her own mother, doubts her story. When she discovers her younger son, Juan, is gay, Amalia disowns him and throws him out of the house. Societal racist misogyny and her childhood trauma force Amalia to become a petty tyrant who oppresses her own children. For how many Chicanas is Amalia an accurate trope? For example, Pearl Fernandez of the Antelope Valley has pleaded guilty to allowing her boyfriend to abuse and torture her young son, Gabriel, to death for acting effeminately (Garcia). Another petty tyrant is Lupe Moreno, infamous "Proud Chicana Minuteman," who actively campaigns against undocumented immigrants, even though she was once married to an undocumented immigrant, and Vivian Martinez of Orange County, another xenophobic activist who declares, "'We are not like them,' she said of undocumented Latinos" (Delson). Through the character of Amalia Gomez, Rechy illustrates the colonized mind from a Chicana's perspective, a dire warning for future Chicanx generations.
Ridley Scott released his neo-noir science fiction classic, Blade Runner in 1982, the start of the Reagan era, describing a bleak future in which multinational corporations genetically engineer their own race of expendable workers, "replicants" (code for Mexicans), for dangerous work in outer space colonies. Harrison Ford plays the role of Rick Deckard, a law enforcement agent known as "blade runners" charged with the task of decommissioning any replicant on Earth, as they are banned for fear of stealing work from "real" humans. Set in the early twenty-first century, Blade Runner recalls historical events such as the mass deportation of Mexicans and Chicanas/os from the U.S. during the Great Depression and the conflicting immigration policies of the Bracero Program and Operation Wetback. This is not the first anti-immigrant/anti-Mexican film in Scott's oeuvre. Scott's film, Alien, released in 1979, depicts an (illegal) alien invading a sovereign corporate ship that interrupts commerce by slaughtering its crew and impregnating each member who die once the alien offspring bursts from their stomachs. Alien evokes fears of Mexican women birthing hordes of children, thus eliciting the need to implement sterilization practices at hospitals in areas heavily populated with Mexican/Chicana women. Whether Scott, a British national, is calling attention to historical xenophobic policies or is warning his white brethren to beware of the hordes of Third World peoples, particularly women of color, invading sovereign First World Nations to leach resources from hard-working citizens can only be ascertained from an analysis of his complete body of work.
Blade Runner's protagonist, Rick Deckard, represents another colonized mind. Suffering from internal colonization, the blade runner seeks to deport/decommission all replicants from Earth. Unbeknownst to Deckard as he pursues the fugitive replicants is the fact that he too is a replicant, akin to a slave acting as an overseer. According to postcolonial theorists such as Albert Memmi and Paolo Freire, once a people have been colonized, they begin to identify with the colonizer, thus the formation of petty tyrants, colonized people granted limited power who treat other colonized people harsher than the colonizer. At one point in the film, Deckard is hanging for his life from a ledge and a replicant remarks, "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave." Deckard resigns from his blade running duties to live with Rachael, a replicant femme fatale who is unaware of her status as a replicant. Must a replicant (Mexican) adopt a false identity in order to escape the clutches of the State? Rachael's unawareness of her replicant identity conjures historical amnesia who must wear the mask of "real" humanity in order to escape termination. Mexicans, therefore, integrate more easily into this culture if they adopt Western values and practices and ultimately "forget" who they are. Why terminate Mexicans if their minds can be further colonized by the allure of a staid, plastic middle-class life as a reward for obedient servitude.
The City of Angels represents a microcosm of the hemisphere. An expanding working-class brown population is juxtaposed against a diminishing middle and wealthy white populace. The structural impediments instituted and supported by white supremacy account for much of the stagnation of the Chicanx/Latina/o population in this country. Additionally, internal colonization and its perpetuation continue to segment our community into "us vs. them." The Chicanx population of Los Angeles stands on the precipice of permanent wage enslavement with the possibility of escaping such a fate through the painfully difficult process of decolonization. Rechy's The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez and Scott's Blade Runner describe dystopic realities where Chicanxs serve as a permanent underclass who exist to serve those in power—the State, the Church, the Corporation. Both works represent warnings of such an impending future. Do we heed Morrissey's lyrics and decolonize ourselves from our masters? Or are Chicanxs doomed to slavery and petty tyranny?
Works Cited
Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, and Veronica Cartwright. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. DVD.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, and Edward James Olmos. Warner, 1982. DVD.
Brown Anna and Mark Hugo Lopez. "Mapping the Latino Population, By State, County and City." Pew Hispanic Research Center. Pew Research Center. 29 August 2013. Web. 10 June 2015.
Delson, Jennifer. "Latinos Work to Shore up Border." The Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles Times. 14 August 2005. Web. 10 June 2015.
Garcia, Michelle. "Report: Couple Refuses Deal in Torture Case." The Advocate. The Advocate. 30 October 2014. Web. 10 June 2015.
Morrissey. "Glamorous Glue." HMV, 1992. CD.
Rechy, John. Bodies and Souls. New York: Grove, 2001. Print.
--. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. New York: Grove, 1991. Print.