Sign in or register
for additional privileges

Latino/a Mobility in California History

Genevieve Carpio, Javier Cienfuegos, Ivonne Gonzalez, Karen Lazcano, Katherine Lee Berry, Joshua Mandell, Christofer Rodelo, Alfonso Toro, Authors

This comment was written by Katherine Lee Berry on 29 Oct 2014.

You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.

Latin@ or not, I'm lost in Los Angeles

I definitely agree with Ivonne that this trailer for “Ask the Dust” feels completely wrong, especially seeing it so soon after finishing the book. Both Bandini and Camilla are romanticized; jokes are added that don’t exist in the book, and they appear to have much more chemistry than do the unbelievably awkward and ill-fitting Camilla and Bandini in the novel. It’s clear from these discrepancies that, as is common with book-to-movie adaptations, some of the grit and uncomfortable feel of the book has been pared down and a false love between played up between the two main characters.
In the actual book, I think that by using Bandini to voice stereotypes about Mexican women in a way that is so vulgar, offensive, and startling (he is randomly racist towards her out of nowhere many times over, even when they seem to be getting along) Fante is illustrating his own disagreement with these stereotypes; he doesn’t slip them in subtly throughout the novel as if they were okay, but makes them obvious and jolting to the reader.
In terms of Camilla’s representation when it comes to the sexualized, sultry image of Latina women we so often see on screen, I would say that while her erratic behavior in the novel perhaps supports a general idea of women as “crazy” (though Bandini’s own behavior puts him in this category too…), she doesn’t seem stereotypically “Latina” to me. She doesn’t throw herself at Bandini, and she certainly isn’t smooth or consistently desirable, and her mysteriousness stems from her own chaotic mentality, and not from some sexual coyness. She is a lonely, confused, low-income girl hooked on marijuana and seemingly alone in a huge city, in love with a man who beats her. To me, the point of her character is not her Latina-ness but these characteristics. The behavior of both her and Bandini seem to serve more as a representation of the intense loneliness, confusion, and hard living that Los Angeles offered to many young people who had arrived hoping to take advantage of its promise as a land of freedom and opportunity. This idea of Los Angeles, as Mitchell impressed upon us in his analysis of California’s landscape, is mostly façade. I’d say Camilla’s story is more related to the RHCP song Ivonne linked to than to stereotypes of Latina women.
(I’d use examples from the text, but I already returned the book to Bass -__- )
Comment on this page
 

Discussion of "Latin@ or not, I'm lost in Los Angeles"

Add your voice to this discussion.

Checking your signed in status ...