No Puedo Comprender o Entender Spanglish

Ay, Dios! It was really hard for me to take the 2004 film Spanglish all that seriously. Yes, I know. It was a comedy. But even by comic standards, it was hard to take seriously. What was the main point of this movie anyway?

Anglos can be condescending to the Latins they hire? El Norte covered that same ground better over two decades ago. By now, it's almost a cliché.

Success is a bad thing? Sure, I can see the Mexican-Americans in El Paso and East LA taking that message very seriously...

And in these days of layoffs and downsizing, how many people worry about being "too" successful anyway?

Yes, I know. It's escapism. And some scenes I'll admit were very funny. For example, the scene in which Adam Sandler's character John Clasky argues with his Mexican maid Flor Moreno (played by Spanish actress Paz Vega) while her daughter Cristina (played by Tejana actress Shelbie Bruce) translates for both John and Flor.

But, c'mon. A film that implied you have to go through Texas to get to California from Mexico? A film that implied most Mexicans choose to come to certain parts of the US based on the number of Mexicans already there and not, say, the number of jobs available there?

And since the script chose to make race an issue, why cast a Spanish actress like Paz Vega for the part of a character who considered herself non-white? After all, many Spaniards not only consider themselves white, but have been historically obnoxious about it. And Mexicans of Spanish descent definitely consider themselves white. Indeed, they get insulted if you imply they're anything else.

Why not cast someone who was not European? LA has one of the largest Latino populations in the country. And yet they couldn't find one American-born Latina actress who could play this part? Let's hear it for outsourcing...

Why for that matter was the main Mexican character in this movie a maid? Yes, I know many Mexican women in LA are maids and that it would be unrealistic to see an illegal alien like Flor in an upper-class position.

But why is it that at a time when more and more Latinas are entering the middle and upper classes in this country that so many Hollywood movies see fit to cast Latinas as either servants or illegal aliens, if not both? And why do you so rarely see a Latina character in a Hollywood movie who is anything else?

I'm not the most politically correct person in the world, but I get all so tired of seeing yet another Hollywood movie pretend that the type of Latinas I see every day just don't exist. And yet most of the complaints Anglo film critics have had about this movie have concerned how Clasky's Anglo wife was portrayed. How nice to see how some things never change...