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Out of the Mouths of Spanglish Babes

There's a moment in Spanglish that seems to capture the essence of what I was getting at in my book, Living in Spanglish. It's the scene where Mexican domestic servant Flor (Paz Vega) confronts high-end chef John Clasky (Adam Sandler) because he paid her daughter Christina (Shelbie Bruce) hundreds of dollars for fetching glass stones from the shores of his tony Malibu beach house. Since Flor speaks little English, Christina is forced into the role of translator and carries out each side of the argument, shouting and gesticulating, mirroring the emotions displayed by Flor and John. Her own interests are hinted at during various parts of the argument, and she pretty much steals the scene, but in the end, she has little or no impact on driving the plot forward.

In a nutshell, Christina epitomizes how we live in Spanglish. The translator, the go-between, the Eleguá, so to speak, of contemporary Anglo American society, the Spanglish gal or guy has grown up with the best and worst of both worlds. But keeping with the current climate of narrow-minded backwardness that permeates the Bush era, we are diminished, marginalized, rendered childlike. (Recent cabinet appointees are infantilized yes-men. Not that it was that much better under Bill.) It's the same corner Latinos have been pushed into since we began to engage El Norte in the 19th century. Gregorio Cortez? Greasy wetback. Ricky Ricardo? Hot-tempered, conga-playing cabana boy. West Side Story's Maria? Naive, trusting girl. The Capeman? Knucklehead, teenage thug. Like Christina, our best bet is honing that Princeton University admissions application (the text that literally provides the narrative for the movie) so that we can enter into the mainstream and GROW UP.

Perhaps writer/director James L. Brooks's point was to demonstrate the wisdom that comes from the mouths of Spanglish babes (Christina and Flor), who wind up appearing more capable and mature than their Anglo counterparts John, Deborah (Tea Leoni), and her mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman). But even if so, the end result is that onscreen, in the virtual reality of Anglo American cinema, Latinos are inevitably maids-in-waiting. After having been the root of the living history of the Americas since before the birth of the U.S., we are still just recent immigrants.

According to advance reports, the auteurist extremes Brooks takes with Deborah's character is most likely an attempt to exorcise the bad taste left in his mouth from a recent divorce. Deborah's over-the-top annoying white bitch nearly renders the first half of the film unwatchable, although Leoni comes off as brilliant actress struggling with sitcom dialog disguised as low-grade Ingmar Bergman angst. Flor is drawn as a paragon of sensibility and decency to contrast with Deborah, and Brooks makes Christina more intelligent and resourceful than Clasky's daughter. If you read between the lines, the Mexican immigrant's lack of neurotic affectation is something Anglos can learn from. But let's face it, no one who leaves this theater will doubt that bourgeois existential crises are still the hallmark of a superior, advanced civilization.

There are many suspensions of disbelief required to stick through the early "plot" development. The early interview scene with Deborah and Evelyn is farcical and strained. Recent Mexican immigrants are seen partying to hipster faves Ozomatli. Though played with graceful understatement by Vega, Flor is way too hot to be a humble single mother domestic servant. Somehwat dressed down in dowdy sweaters, she still looks like the star of Sex and Lucía. She doesn't even attempt a Mexican accent--in fact, her aggressive Castillian diction belies her supposed humility. Just in time for the brave new world of free-trade zones, Vega brings us the new, domesticated Latin spitfire.

Strangely enough, completely against my strongest instincts, the movie begins to turn on Vega's sheer presence. Almost in the way Samantha Morton's mute performance stole Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, she gestures, sighs, bats her eyes, and becomes the answer to Adam Sandler's female trouble. (His gender role-reversal with Leoni's character--the cooking, the compassionate parenting, the selflessness--is symbolic of Brooks's frustration. "Decency is sexy" was originally considered as a marketing tagline for the film, suggesting that patriarchy filtered through traditional female passivity is the white liberal male's moral mandate.) Her moonlit, skirt-blown profile pose in a climactic beach scene with Sandler was, yes, Marilyn-worthy.

But you wonder why I'm spending so many words on this almost-good film, one that will receive reviews as mixed as the true Spanglish state of mind itself. In the end, Spanglish never transcends its Sound of Music meets Mary Tyler Moore Show limitations. For all its attempts at engineering talented-tenth remedies to social inequity (Christina gets a brief shot at elite private schooling), this is still frankly a master-slave narrative. And despite the movie's brilliant ending scene, in which cultural assimilation is made as universal as the parent-child separation, it's all about the Anglo-American gaze. There are only two other Latino/a characters in the movie besides the Spanglish babes, and they are both barely articulate immigrants.

Granted there is a sizable constituency of don't-rock-the-boat Hispanics (mostly new Bush voters) who might be relieved that Spanglish trades the thug stereotype for a How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria/we-know-our-place soft-shoe. It's no coincidence that the Malibu house used for the crucial scenes in the movie once belonged to blackface pioneer Al Jolson. This is a movie that pretends to confront the hemispheric clash of Anglo and Latino cultures in the original workplace--the home. But all Spanglish proves is that white men can be victims, too, "free" women have a lot to learn from their subjugated sisters, and Hollywood still can't see Latinos for the leaf-blowers.

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