The Bronze Screen

Book excerpt: Explores Chicana and Chicano popular culture through contemporary representations in both Hollywood commercial and independent cinema. Rosa Linda Fregoso's The Bronze Screen opens the way for international debate on the new critical field of Chicano/a cinema. Fregoso provides an incisive articulation of the ways in which narrative codes in film can telescope complex versions of Mexican and American culture and history. The often violent impact of 'first' (U.S.) and 'third' (Mexico) world cultures and geographies is channeled through the very term Chicano/a as well as its cinematic representation. Fregoso's masterful critique brings out with great clarity the irony, paradox, and contradictions of such historical collisions. --Norma Alarcón, University of California, Berkeley