Could he have crossed if it had been like this back then? I asked him.Īs my dad got out of the car to cross into Mexico, I double-checked to make sure he had his passport. Today, whenever we're near the border, we often remark on how tall the fence has gotten. citizen since the early '90s) to the Tijuana airport. Over the holidays, I drove my dad (a U.S. remains as relevant today as it was in 1987.
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Marin's movie was hilarious, but also a warning about how anti-immigrant sentiment can become a convenient proxy for anti-Latino racism. But it turns out he's dived right into a Border Patrol truck that's also in disguise - as a much larger bush. He ducks behind some nearby foliage in the nick of time. Thinking he's in the clear, he ditches the disguise. When he spots a Border Patrol agent, he crouches down like a desert scrub. In one scene, after hopping the border fence, Rudy is trekking through the hills of southern San Diego County with a bush strapped to his back. Hilarity ensues as Rudy tries again and again to get home. He ends up stuck in Tijuana because immigration officers don't believe he's a U.S. The film, written, directed by and starring Cheech Marin, is a satire about a Los Angeles-born Chicano named Rudy who gets mistakenly rounded up during an immigration raid at a factory and deported.
His stories always reminded me of Born in East L.A. In his retelling of these cat-and-mouse chases, he was always just a little bit cannier than his pursuers.
in the '70s, hiding from Border Patrol under bridges or curled up in the trunk of a car. Right around this point, my mom would turn to the back seat and say something like, "You know, your dad came through here." Then my dad would tell us stories of crossing into the U.S. It let us know we were entering the borderlands. I knew we were getting close when the freeway divider suddenly shot up 6 feet, a barrier to discourage migrants who'd already hopped the fence from making it across Interstate 5. When I was growing up, my family often visited Tijuana, a two-hour drive south of our house in Orange County. If you haven't, go watch them this weekend! If you're Latino and have seen these, you probably quote from them liberally. When I was a kid in Southern California, there were several films that helped me make sense of what it meant to grow up Mexican in the States. (Apologies to the newscast folks who have to sit near us.) Recently, we got into this big discussion about movies we watched over and over again growing up - not just because they're good, but also because, in one way or another, they reflected our lives as people of color in the United States.
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Right: Scott Del Amo/AFP/Getty ImagesĪt Code Switch, we like movies. Left: Zoetrope/New Line/Kobal Collection. These films were probably playing heavily on your parents' minds when you sat down to have a 'little talk' with them re: your sexuality after your first term at university. In Summer of Sam, bisexual Adrien Brody is beaten half to death, and Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together portrays a gruelling string of ill-fated relationships. It also helped cement the image of the 'tragic gay' in the mind of the mainstream, one that was perpetuated by a century of stories where the queer protagonist dies or ends up alone and miserable in the end. It brought a sympathetic LGBTQ+ character to the mainstream, although some queer critics thought it played things very safe by focusing too much on Denzel Washington's straight lawyer character, and it hardly represented a U-turn in Hollywood's attitudes to homosexuality. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for 1993's Philadelphia, in which he played a dying HIV+ gay man. Movies: Philadelphia, Summer of Sam, Happy TogetherĪs we slowly emerged from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, it's small wonder that its shadow continued to loom over '90s movies.