| Abstrakt: |
This essay explores the complex intersection between gender, sexuality, and race by critically interrogating a film directed by a Chicano, about Chicanos, and, yet, for Chicano and white audiences. Peter Bratt's La Mission (2009) sheds meaning on the contradictory spaces inhabited by "borderland" identities--where contemporary Latinos exist in a state of unrest as they struggle to assert themselves within a dominant social order while attempting to remain true to traditions of homeland. I engage a circular method of critique by forwarding a Latino trinity for reading place; wherein the physical dimension refers to one's geographic community; the symbolic dimension includes one's psycho-emotional state and mytho-historical genealogy; and the performative dimension embodies everyday life enactments of identity. I position the "politics of place" as a unique rhetorical speculative tool to refer to one's spatial situation as an unmistakably political act and one that can be as equally empowering as it can be disabling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
