Visual slippage: Gouging the colonial eye con Los Punks

ABSTRACT

I analyze Los Punks: We Are All We Have (2016) for three themes that characterize the (im)migrant family, the savage Latinx adolescent, and the colonial hero constructed in represented urban environments. The recorded space in the documentary denotes cultural authenticity while attempting to transform Latinx performances into assimilationist archetypes of Othered (im)migrant subjects. I argue that visual slippage in (im)migrant representation forms an associative relationship composing assimilation narratives created under cultural legitimacy for colonizing eyes gazing at captured (im)migrant life. I add that (im)migrants reciprocate the colonial gaze by confronting it with embodied, visual, and environmental performances affirming lived experiences with non-White viewers—effectively gouging the colonial eye from the reception codes meant to naturalize neocolonial logics.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinx subjectivity
• neocolonial (im)migrant representation
• Vans documentary
• visual slippage
• and East L.A. punk

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Dr. Bernadette Marie Calafell and the reviewers for your keen insight and careful consideration. Thank you, Dr. Kent A. Ono, for reviewing the initial draft of this manuscript.

Notes

1 Union 13. (2000). The Game. On Youth, Betrayal, and the Awakening [CD, Album]. Epitaph.

2 Latinx is the gender inclusive term of the panethnic label of Latina/o.

3 Boatwright’s work can be viewed on her website: http://www.angelaboatwright.com.

4 I refer to (im)migrant as a term signifying Latinx migrant communities that exist in Los Angeles, whether they may be documented, undocumented, or the children of migrant parents.

5 Los Angeles has a long history of (im)migrant music scenes connected to the struggles of a recultured U.S. American experience (Avant-Mier, 2010; Davila, 2016; Kun, 2004; Lipsitz, 2007; Zavella, 2012). U.S. (im)migrant life inhabits musical genres that they produce in a way that reflects their daily experiences of mestizaje as a negotiation of U.S. Latinx experience through incorporation of their culture. Movements in Latinx punk have been in the Eastside of Los Angeles through Los Illegals, The Zeros, and The Brat in the 70s and 80s, culminating in this period with the opening of The Vex, East L.A.’s first punk venue (Nuñez & Urízar, 2015).