You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search. If they were to exist as a viable Hispanic community within the confines of the United States, they had to define and assert themselves as a group, they had to create a unified front to bring cohesion and improve their social, political, and economic standing.
Since they could not claim Mexico anymore as their land, they appropriated another imaginary one, a mythical geographical space called Aztlan. It is there that according to legend, the Chichimec people—from whom they claimed direct descent—were chosen by the god Huitzilopochtli to go further south and build the Aztec empire. Since Aztlan was supposedly located somewhere in the southwest of the United States, it also gave the Mexican immigrants a sense of entitlement to the land where they were treated now as invaders.
Their journey was therefore also a return to the origin. Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a self-styled shaman and performance artist, contributed to this shift with his polemical writings on border culture. Unbeknown to them, when they crossed the border, their voyage had just begun. The trend continued and became even worse for those who moved up from Mexico in different waves of immigration starting in when thousands of Mexican miners went to California attracted by the Gold Rush.
They were expelled or lynched by groups of vigilantes 4. Hence, when cinema was born in , both the Mexican people and the place where it now flourishes Hollywood were already face-to-face in California. This coincidence of time and space led the immigrants to conceptualize their inner journey in search of identity through the moving image.
The moving image offered the possibility of a symbolic journey that mirrored the one taken by them, or their ancestors. As Cultural Studies theorist, Stuart Hall proposed :. Cinema [has to be considered] not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists but as that form of representation which is also able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects and thereby enable us to discover who we are 5. Both movies and Mexican-Americans have at their chore a dynamic of change.
