Ejected Spectatorship III: Disidentification
Pachuco Goes to the MoviesI use this passage from Stewart, in part to defend my own choice of bringing in fictional and speculative accounts around this riot – portions of Griffith’s American Me and especially Alegría’s “¿A qué lado de la cortina?” In the epigraph that starts this section, Alegría animates many questions around spectatorship in a short paragraph through the character of Pancho. Pancho both identifies and disidentifies with the characters played by Gary Cooper and Ginger Rogers. On one level, he identifies with the romance being played out on screen in courting his own white American girlfriend, with the resemblance between Nancy and Ginger Rogers stated explicitly -- If you see Ginger, she looks like Nancy! And how like Ginger does Nancy look! And yet, Pancho can see that he is not like Gary Cooper, he is Mexican and Cooper is white. Cooper wears a navy uniform, while Pancho wears a zoot suit. Pancho sees Cooper on the screen, and while he identifies with his portrayed lust, he also recognizes the gulf between his position and Cooper’s position as a national hero. Of course, this scene of identification is violently disrupted when sailors grab and punch Pancho, dragging him out onto the city street. Pancho is the ejected spectator. Like the narratives recounted earlier, the young Mexican American teen is physically, literally pulled out of the moviegoing scene of identification or disidentification; ejected physically, discarded symbolically. While a movie like Zoot Suit, explored in the “Sense of Pachuca” Scalar section, portrays this ejection in an attempt to recover and suture the subject back into a whole ethnic subject, by addressing the Mexican American male spectator specifically, this project is more interested in that act of ejection and what it might reveal about racial and ethnic spectatorship during the wartime period.
From this era in American history, here is another fictional account of an ejected spectator, though this example represents psychic torment rather than explicit physical violence. If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), the canonical African American novel written by Chester Himes, is set in Los Angeles during the war. The story portrays the unsettling period of time in the life of shipyard worker Bob Jones, a black American recently moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland. Narrated in the first person, Himes vividly expresses Bob’s frustration and anger at the racism he experiences. The novel opens with Bob elaborating on the insidious and subtle forms of racism he encountered in the city. For example, describing how it felt to seek employment:
Bob also describes being disturbed by the sudden internment of Japanese Americans during the war, which he sees as a sign of the dangers and threats posed to racialized subjects by the city’s racist practices. While Himes addresses the Zoot Suit Riot elsewhere in the novel, it is a brief scene at a movie theater that most explicitly invokes the figure of the ejected spectator. After leaving upset from tense situations in a bar then a drugstore, Bob walks around downtown preparing to watch a movie. Walking past Bullock’s department store, sidewalks packed with pedestrians and other movie theaters, he finally takes a seat at the Loew’s State Theater. While settling in the audience, Bob sits down next to two white couples. One of the couples trades seats so that the woman of the couple does not have to sit next to Bob. After this incident, Bob is so demoralized by the compounded blow of having the film feature “a big fat black Hollywood mammy,” that he walks out of the theater.“It wasn’t being refused employment in the plants so much… it wasn’t that so much. It was the look on the people’s faces when you asked them about a job….As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, ‘I can talk.’ It shook me” (3).
“I never found out the nature of the picture or what it was about. After about five minutes a big fat black Hollywood mammy came on the screen saying: ‘Yassum’ and ‘Noam,’ and grinning at her young white missy; and I got up and walked out” (79).
This scene immediately calls to mind Diawara’s concept of the resisting spectator. Unable to passively receive the racist caricature depicted on screen, Bob must leave. However, at least in the article cited here, Diawara focuses on black male reception of images of black men as villains. In the moviegoing experience Himes portrays here the caricature of scorn is a “mammy” character, similar to the controversial roles Hattie McDaniel is remembered for. Bob refuses to identify with a racist caricature, removing himself voluntarily from the theater. However, the disruption the caricature introduces in Bob’s viewing is portrayed as a sort of psychic attack; an unexpected and unwanted attack on blackness. The specificity of this character as a “mammy,” nevertheless, is significant in its difference from Diawara’s criticism of Birth of a Nation and The Color Purple in “Black spectatorship,” in which he focuses on two scenes depicting black men as represented threats of sexual assault. By choosing a “mammy” figure, Himes places the shame and burden of representation on black women, perhaps one instance that confirms accusations of Himes’ multi-faceted problems with women.[i]
Significant for this study is that it is not exclusively the content of the film that triggers Bob’s leaving the movie theater mid-scene. Leading up to the appearance of the offending servant caricature, Bob must contend with a subtle gesture of racism (what might now be called a micro-aggression) in the couple’s shuffling of seats to keep Bob as far from the white woman as possible. This discriminatory social act within the theater, compounded by his experiences outside the movie theater – the earlier snub in service at a downtown drugstore, the disdainful look two Mexican American women give him on Seventh Street walking to the theater – influence how he then identifies with the content projected on the screen. As he sits in the audience of Loew’s State Theater, watching a racist scene, he is “socially and historically as well as psychically constituted” (Diawara 846).[ii]
In this scene, the refused identification with a black character matters not only because of the offensive film’s content, but also because of the social context of discrimination (along racial, gender and economic vectors) that shapes the site of reception for “socially and historically constituted” spectators. To bring Himes more explicitly into conversation with the Zoot Suit Riots, though Bob has an antagonistic encounter with Mexican American women on the street outside of the movie theater (unsurprisingly antagonism grounded in gender difference tinged with sexual anxiety), he forms a kindred relationship with two pachucos at the story’s end.
[i] Hilton Als explores this dimension to Himes’ work in the introduction to If He Hollers, Let Him Go (2004): “For Himes’ heroes…resentment toward the mother often spills over into relationships with other women…Women are overbearing mother and clawing child in one.” (xvi)
[ii] Another scene that depicts a black man waiting in the dark for a racist depiction to appear on the screen is included at the end of the chapter “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks (1967). Fanon writes: “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theater are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim” (140). For a proposed reconsideration of Fanon’s project of justice through his applications of temporality via cinema, see Kara Keeling, “‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation.” Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History 13.1 (2001): 91–117.
This page has paths:
- Pachuco Goes to the Movies Veronica Paredes
- Projecting 1943 Veronica Paredes
