"Mi Vida Loca" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL August 27, 1994 I'm happy to be back at this microphone after being away for several weeks. I saw some films on my travels and the one I want to talk about today hasn't come to Tampa yet, but I hope it does. It's called "Mi Vida Loca" which means "My Crazy Life." It's the second feature film by a very interesting woman filmmaker who makes films about women's lives, Allison Anders. We saw her first effort, "Gas, Food, Lodging" here a couple of years ago. Even though Allison Anders is an Anglo who hails from Kentucky, that first film gave an indication that she has an interest in Mexican-American culture. In "La Vida Loca," the screenplay of which predates "Gas Food Lodging," we see this interest in Chicano culture--or at least in certain aspects of that culture --developed into the main focus of the film. "Mi Vida Loca" is a film about contemporary Chicana gang life in Los Angeles. Not Chicano but Chicana. That in itself is enough to make this interesting from a women's perspective. How many films can you think of that depict the fabric of the lives of Mexican-American women and focus on the women as opposed to the men in their lives? (I don't know of any except maybe "Salt of the Earth" back in the fifties, although there is a documentary called "Las Mujeres de Pilsen" made by Maria Benfield and Maria Lugones in which Chicanas who live in the Chicago neighborhood called Pilsen talk in detail about their lives.) Anders's interest in these women was piqued several years ago when she was living in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and they were her neighbors, but it took a long time and a great deal of effort on her part to win their confidence and friendship. Many of the women in "Mi Vida Loca" are the "homegirls" from the neighborhood and they helped Anders on the dialogue so it sounds authentic and current. The word "Mi" in the title "Mi Vida Loca" has multiple referents in the film, because it is structured as a series of interconnected vignettes, each one narrated in voice-over by a different person. But it is equally applicable to each one--their lives are all crazy in the sense of being violent, dangerous, and incredibly controlled by the dictates of the gang and the other restrictive cultures they inhabit. But you have to wonder what is crazier, the gang life they lead on the streets of their Echo Park barrio, or the oppressive social conditions that have existed for generations for Mexican Americans in places like Los Angeles (the scene of murderous anti-Mexican riots when I was a child there) that gang culture developed, and survives, in response to. There is no tightly constructed story here, and one of the wholly admirable things about Anders's screenplay is how she resists tying things up in neat little packages. At the conclusions of many of the vignettes in the film is a momentary sense of closure and resolution, nearly always subsequently destabilized by some new crisis, or the ancient chain of revenge and retribution, or some fact of life in U.S. society that can kill even the strongest resolve to change one's life. The main characters in this film go by the gang names of Sad Girl, Mousie, and Giggles--names which don't describe their personalities at all because the gang naming rituals dictate that you take the name of a former gang member who is no longer part of the gang, so you take whatever names are available. In the first vignette Sad Girl (Angel Aviles) relates how she and Mousie (Seidy Lopez) have been best friends since they were children and enter the gang together and remain devoted even after Mousie becomes the girlfriend of baby-faced drug dealer Ernesto (Jacob Vargas). When Mousie has her baby and Ernesto finds her no longer as much fun as she had been, he turns to Sad Girl and gets her pregnant as well. Betrayed by both Ernesto and Sad Girl, this thoroughly patriarchal culture dictates that it is Sad Girl she'll blame and hate and Ernesto she'll welcome back with open arms. The feud between the women escalates until they agree to fight each other one on one, and it escalates again into a shootout when Ernesto gives Mousie a gun (but he doesn't tell her it doesn't work) and one of the other gang girls gives Sad Girl a gun, too, and they end up mimicing the worst aspects of ritualized male behavior, in a formal duel with pistols. When they end up not shooting one another and reconciling in their grief over Ernesto's death, there is momentary talk about women not being able to resort to such violence--on the the many points that is made and then deconstructed elsewhere in the film. A number of the women in the film are trying to escape or to change their crazy lives. One, Giggles (Marlo Maron), has figured out while in jail for something her boyfriend did, that the gang culture's fixation on their men is harmful to the women and she vows to make herself independent, for, as she points out, by the time they're twenty-one nearly all the male gang members are dead, disabled or in jail. Smart, attractive, a natural leader and armed with this new insight about her life, you root for her not only to succeed but to raise the consciousness of her homegirls, as well. She tries to organize the women to stand up to the male gang members to get them to give Mousie and Sad Girl the proceeds from Ernesto's hot low-rider truck, for example. But the obstacles are daunting, the men want no part of independent women and independence requires economic resources, which brings her face to face the problem of a convicted felon with no education getting a decent job. And there is Sad Girl's sister named, with a pervasive internalized racism that valorizes Anglo features, "La Blue Eyes"--who goes to college and is not a member of the gang. But she too, gets sucked into the violent and gut wrenching life around her despite her best efforts to be different, trapped by her romanticism and love of language and ideas into loving unwisely. While the themes and happenings in this film are not what you might call "entertaining" they are informative, honest, and, as far as I can tell, quite a realistic dramatization of the lives of young women such as these in the LA barrios. The only thing that rang false was the absence of the older women in the community; we see fathers but no mothers. Giggles's older sister is the only even slightly more mature woman in the whole film. The film's strength is in the respect that it pays to these young women and respect is surely part of what is needed if they are going to gain the strength to create for themselves a less crazy mode of life. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Linda Lopez McAlister is professor of women's studies and philosophy at the University of South Florida. Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.