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Identity Produced Within Representation

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After being jailed on a false rape charge, Bob is released on the condition of joining the Army. The story concludes with Bob being transported to the recruiting station with two young Mexican American men dressed in drape pants, the lower half component of the zoot suit.
 

 “The sergeant didn’t even look at me; he called over to a cop by the door in a bored, indifferent voice, ‘Here’s another soldier.’”
“’Come on, boy,’ the cop said.”
“The two Mexican youths he had with him grinned a welcome.”
…
“They were both brown-skinned, about my colour, slender and slightly stooped, with Indian features and thick curly hair. Both wore bagged drapes that looked about to fall down from their waists, and greyish dirty T shirts. They talked in the melodious Mexican lilt.”
…
“They fell in beside me and we went out and started up the hill toward the induction centre, the three of us abreast and the cop in the rear.” (203)


Stuart Hall writes in his article “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation” about the importance of separating cultural identity from some “essentialised past,” that:
 

“instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” (68)

 
These scenes of reception and spectatorship demonstrate not only that moviegoing was fraught with vulnerability and danger, both physical and psychical, but that it was practiced socially, spatially, and racially. The Sense of Pachuca section in Scalar further explores how these factors, along with gender and sexuality, also influence how this event was mediated as history. 
 

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  1. Pachuco Goes to the Movies Veronica Paredes