Excess spaces: Movement and ethnoscapes in Brian De Palma’s Scarface and Edward James Olmos’ American Me

Ethnic peripheries: Urban imaginaries of the Latin mob

Directed by Brian De Palma and written by Oliver Stone, Scarface is set in Miami in the aftermath of the Mariel boat crisis. It tells the story of two Cuban thugs, Tony Montana (Al Pacino) and Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer), as they transition from a life of petty crime and incarceration in Fidel Castro’s Cuba to the largely corrupt land of opportunity that is 1980s Florida. Montana and Ribera land in a refugee camp called ‘Freedom Town’, eventually settling in Cuban Miami, an urban space that the film portrays as a hybrid of US and Latin American tropicalities, one that the TV series Miami Vice (1984–1989) helped popularize and, to an extent, also configure in the following decade. ⁴ Bullying and murdering his way to the top in Miami’s gangster underworld, Montana joins the ranks of Jewish drug lord Frank López (Robert Loggia). Montana falls for Frank’s wife, the snobbish Elvira Hancock from Baltimore (Michelle Pfeiffer). He murders Frank, usurping his position as Miami’s top drug tycoon and forcing Elvira into marrying him. Montana’s entanglements with local political forces and with hemispherically distant allies lead to his dramatic decline and downfall in the film’s epic last sequences.

American Me was directed and produced by Edward James Olmos, a Mexican American actor well known for roles as detective Gaff in Blade Runner and as police lieutenant Martin Castillo in Miami Vice. Unlike Scarface, Olmos’ film does not appropriate an ethnic Other to construct an iconic gangster figure. It is instead a first-person biopic based on the life of Mexican American gangster Rodolfo Cadena. Indeed, American Me exhibits an intense degree of ethnic and personal identification, deploying a great deal of detail in its portrayal of East Los Angeles gang cultures. ⁵ Olmos not only directed and co-produced the biopic but also played the protagonist role of adult East Los Angeles gangster Montoya Santana. In her focused, psychoanalysis-inflected study of the film, Ana Dopico (2007) notes insightfully, ‘When I realized that American Me offered a masculinist prison imaginary as a central interpretive trope for American identity, I thought this an insidious notion, since it seemed a radical circumscription of political metaphors for Latino American identity’ (p. 218). In dialogue with Dopico’s observation, I am arguing that the narrative biopic attempts to document a life of gang involvement and imprisonment in ways that are curiously symmetrical with Scarface – symmetrical, that is, if we care to disentangle the specific cultural mappings and distinct spatial coordinates informing the Caribbean, Latin American and Latino masculinities that both films suggest and project variously against the larger canvas of what Dopico calls ‘American identity’.

Both films explore and rhapsodize about the themes of migration and delinquency, conflicted masculinity and material ambition, ethnic belonging and family romance. However, each one focuses on a neatly differentiated cultural location and political genealogy: Cuban Miami in the critical aftermath of the Mariel boat crisis and Mexican East Los Angeles seen through the lens of penitentiary gang cultures. Very early in American Me, we witness in a flashback how Santana’s parents, Pedro and Esperanza, are caught in the 1943 ‘Zoot Suit’ riots of East Los Angeles. This happens as Pedro is having a tattoo made that reads ‘por vida’ (for life) as a celebration of his love for Esperanza (Hope). Soon after that, Pedro and a Mexican friend are badly beaten by a group of US sailors, while other sailors rape Esperanza, in what Dopico (2007) describes as ‘a scene of shame, violation and torture’ (p. 228). Building on the traumatic scenario of this romantic beginning, the film traces the long curve of Santana’s repeated familiarity with incarceration and gang culture against a backdrop of ethnic and biopolitical conflict in Southern California.

US gangster films are concerned overwhelmingly with provincial and isolated outsiders who inhabit the nation’s continental inside – a form of existential confinement on its territorial margins, dwelling in culturally archaic demographic islands, in historically ethnic and migrant-ridden areas such as Chicago’s Little Italy, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and, more recently, Miami, Los Angeles and the ‘suburban meadow’ of New Jersey, as one author writes referring to the hugely popular TV series The Sopranos (1999–2007) (De Stefano, 2006: 136). ⁶ What, then, is distinct about US Latino Gangster films? Scarface and American Me illustrate two distinct versions of what one might call the Latino gangster imagination in US film. The first of these versions is often tied to the phobic irruption of the ‘outbreak narrative’ in Cold-War hemispheric politics. It summons up cultural subplots of corrupt Latin American regimes and corruptible local politicians implicated in shady business with ethnic criminals, while also conveying a sense of crisis in a drug-ridden inner periphery – the ‘periphery’ of US inner cityscapes and ethnic suburbia – and an overall ideology of immigrant deviancy and social decay. ⁷ I would contend that the second version of the Latino gangster imagination re-inscribes inter-American genealogies and cultural memories of biopolitical exclusion, class and ethnic relations, and archaic demographic arrangements. ⁸

Scarface’s spatiality is disruptive and maritime. It is explicitly tropical in that it connects the historically and culturally entangled territories of Cuba and the Florida peninsula via the active presence of a clichéd pan-Caribbean and hemispheric imaginary of ‘banana republics’ and ‘torrid zones’. As Leah Rosenberg (2014) writes,

The current conception of the Anglophone Caribbean as a tropical archipelago of tourist paradises crystallized in the 1950s as tourism in the region expanded into a mass-market, year-round industry targeting the newly prosperous US middle classes. […] The frisson notwithstanding, the British West Indies were marketed as a healthy alternative to Cuba, whose tourism, centered in Havana, was known for vice and pleasure. (p. 361)

In Scarface, the excessive ethnic liquidity of South Florida and Miami Beach seashores adds to the film’s profound sense of paranoid spatiality and cultural dystopia. American Me, however, expresses an acute awareness of the complex historical articulation of a deterritorialized Mexican Americanness that developed through abrupt turns and long processes of belonging, migration and bi-national entanglements across a borderless territorial and political continuum predating the so-called Mexican–American War of 1846–1848 (Gruesz, 2002: 71–107).

Unlike Scarface, American Me projects a strictly urban, concrete-ridden narrative, almost denying access to the disruptive disturbances of a different ethnoscape, if by ethnoscape we understand, in Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) definition,

the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. (p. 33)

Yet, the ethnoscapes of US Latino gangster films are not solely articulated through filmic depictions of their ‘moving groups and individuals’, or through the heterotopic spaces that they must negotiate, leave behind or inhabit and claim as their own. Both ‘America’ and its Latin ethnoscapes – including the thriving and politically invested Pachuco culture that I mentioned earlier – become an ‘Other space’ (an excess space), a continental border zone in which the capillary ramifications of its roads, airports and seaports make up the permanently compromised fantasy of a cohesive and intelligible society. ⁹ The sensorial or haptic recreation of fantasy tropical scenarios and claustrophobic enclosures via Cuban Miami and Mexican Los Angeles incites us to question how and when such ‘Other spaces’ – the relatively self-contained spaces of social vulnerability and lumpen violence – become the loci of an impending undoing of ‘Americanness’ (of an idealized American society of middle-class consumerism, suburban mores and the simulacrum of national belonging). In other words, as I suggest in the following pages, urban America must appear to be corrupted in order to splinter into the excess spaces of US Latino gangster films.

Corrupted spaces: Ethnoscapes from Chinatown to Scarface and American Me

US Latino gangster films do not constitute an autonomous sub-genre. While their debt to Italian mob films and the directorial experiments of the 1970s is evident, they also dialogue in unexpected ways with non-Italian films via the prescriptive Americanness imposed by the genre. It is productive in this regard to deviate our attention momentarily away from our Latino films and their numerous Italian American referents, and to dwell briefly on the specific ways in which ethnoscapes might be seen to ‘travel’ or migrate – here, mob stands for mobility – from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown to Scarface and American Me.

One of the most disturbing and perhaps funniest moments in Chinatown (1974) involves director/actor Roman Polanski cutting (although not severing) a nosy detective’s nose. Private detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) trespasses in a protected area around a reservoir, braving gunshots and almost drowning in a water avalanche in a memorable, suspense-ridden twilight scene. Two men then approach him in the dimly lit outdoors. Gittes addresses one of them: ‘Hello, Claude, where’d you get the midget?’ The ‘midget’ (Polanski) responds by unlocking his knife, then using it on Gittes’ nose as a sadistic warning against further investigations and trespasses. The cut (not quite castrated) nose is not only an image of phallic discomfort but also, and more importantly, a metonym for the nosy and oversexed detective, whose excessive curiosity must be punished. In Chinatown, the nose that smells something funny ends up discovering, confronting and denouncing a member of the corrupt establishment who has stolen the public water supply from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to advance his own business interests and those of his respectful partners in crime. But this violent attack is also a reminder of other, historically persistent forms of territorial displacement, cultural defacement and symbolic rape.

There are elements in this scene that are characteristic of what US gangster films do. While, on the one hand, gangster films are interested in probing, condemning and ultimately regimenting or redeeming gangster subcultures, they are also particularly intent on exploring the psychology of ‘criminal man’ along deterministic, Lombrosian lines, through explorations of idealized masculinities – whether threatening or authoritarian, paternalistic or troubled. As Cesare Lombroso (2006), one of the founders of modern criminology, wrote in Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente, 1876–1897): ‘Instead of trying to cure crime, we must try to prevent it by neutralizing its causes’ (p. 135). Yet, far from neutralizing the causes of crime, some of the most interesting gangster films delve into scenarios of great voyeuristic intensity, exploring spaces of corruption as much as the presumed psychology – or the potential for identification – of those who seem to live both beyond society’s norms and beyond all hope of social cure.

Gittes’ dogged fight to expose corrupt politicians in Chinatown necessitates a considerable investment of his masculinity – even, possibly, its degeneration or loss. It also requires a moment of decisive confrontation with one of society’s most insidious evils: the structural violence that powerful socio-economic agents perpetrate against ‘ethnic’ and ‘outsider’ communities. The anecdote that metaphorically anchors the plot in a much broader genealogy of ethnic and immigrant entanglements in Southern California (what Michael Eaton calls ‘L.A.’s aqueous history’) is grounded in factual evidence: ‘the historical events depicted in the film have been condensed and transposed to the late 1930s from an earlier epoch – the first quarter of the twentieth century’ (Eaton, 1997: 23). However, as he also notes, pointing at the larger stakes at work in the subterraneous recesses of Los Angeles’s historical ethnoscapes: ‘this sordid and protracted tale of capitalist greed and political machination, more than likely erased from the memory of most contemporary Angelenos in this fundamentally amnesiac and contractually transformative of ecologies, forms the background to Chinatown’ (Eaton, 1997: 26).

As Gittes pries and surveys the territory of veiled conspiracies – the barren spaces where the dam is to be built – he sees through his binoculars a man talking with a Chicano boy on horseback surrounded by a landscape of cobbles, boulders and puddles. A few days later, Gittes descends into the barren streambed and encounters the same boy, this time against an eerie mountain light:

– Do you speak English? Habla inglés?

– Sí.

Gittes then asks the boy about the conversation with the man that he had witnessed from a distance. The boy replies and turns to leave, leaving us in turn to respond to the sensorial impact of the dreamlike, almost Buñuelesque irruption of this ethnic trace that bespeaks a conspicuous cultural presence – a presence so excessive and overdetermined by geographical location that it requires no further insistence. Unlike the referential Chinatown that never quite breaks through the film’s referential unconscious, we hear Mexico speak here in a single, yet unquestionable performative gesture: ‘Sí’. When Polanski’s film finally shows its material Chinatown, it does so by exposing it as banal background – an exotic yet entirely unglamorous outsider space that exists inside/outside Los Angeles’ spatial articulations. To return to Eaton’s (1997) eloquent commentary, the economics and politics of cultural and biopolitical displacement do appear to be embedded ‘in this fundamentally amnesiac and contractually transformative of ecologies’ (p. 26). Yet here, as the dry streambed sinks in twilight, the boy appears as a spectral instance of ethnic memory steeped in the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century, just as the ‘Zoot Suit’ riots of the 1940s also remind us of the historical genealogies of displacement and mobility anchoring specific US Latino communal lives.

US gangster films often rely on readily identifiable ethnoscapes such as Brooklyn, Chicago, Miami’s Little Havana or East Los Angeles. In Chinatown, the figure of the virtuous prying detective substitutes that of ambitious ‘lowlifes’, such as Tony Montana and Manny Ribera in Scarface, and Montoya Santana in American Me, who represent their socially marginal groups through morally reprehensible ethnic performances. While detective Gittes represents a somewhat disenfranchised White ‘outsider’, a kind of middle-brow, blue-collar intellectual who might stand for clean values in times of moral uncertainty, the Latino gangster stands for an abrupt divide fracturing and unbinding relations between hominess and sociability, on the one hand, and established ethnic bonds and racial hierarchies, on the other. The Latino gangster, in sum, performs a threatening ethos of wild and uncharted ‘minor’ groups running amok in an always vaguely defined US mainstream society. Not surprisingly, Scarface represents home as a wounded and lost domain. American Me, however, is anxious to figure it as hopeful, despite the foundational scene of rape and physical abuse tarnishing all hope of a conventional family romance. The film stages the constitutive and de-forming wound inflicted on Mexican Americans historically through the rape of Mexican American women and the symbolic – and perhaps normalizing – violation of Pachuco culture in the ‘Zoot Suit’ riots. Yet home in these films is difficult to conceptualize as a middle-class fantasy and as a biopolitical space of controlled sociability and sexual normality.

Chinatown approaches American communities of the margin obliquely, reading their precarious existences and entrenched social tensions as both ethnic and downtrodden, and setting them against a culture of institutional corruption that far exceeds the convenient ethnoscape of a stereotypical Chinatown. ¹⁰ Following genre conventions, US Latino gangster films represent marginal communities by re-inscribing figures of paternity (yet not successful fathers) and tragic heroism. The larger communities that gangsters and gangs represent allegorically remain clearly on the receding margins of their urban ethnoscapes and in positions of radical asymmetry in relation to broader social formations. The leitmotif of the severed nose – a site of violation in the nosey detective’s face – operates here not only as traumatically displaced symbolic loss but also in lieu of a fully dismembered and disfigured social body. The nose-figure therefore reappears as a scar – a scarred personality, a damaged identity and a range of socially disturbing practices and behaviours. Standing for a fragmented and diverse ethnoscape, Montana’s scar-face – or scare-face, as the title almost suggests as well – appears as an excessive face of the Other. It is, as the film sets out to illustrate through its aesthetic ‘assault on the senses’, the product of corrupting and degenerating tropical insularity. ¹¹ By virtue of the gangster’s constitutive defect as a social misfit, the entire face of the community is scarred and grotesquely corrupted in Scarface.

Spaces of rape: Archaic wounds and masculine vices

Gang(ster) films can be read as allegories of the crisis of an idealized social order. They speak to our desire to witness in horror and make sense of the garish mutilations of bodies washing up on river banks in metropolitan areas, of brutal assassinations in downtown scenarios that often involve severed fingers, hands, heads or worse. These kinds of brutish manifestations of atavistic violence can be allegorized into a system of uncompromising loyalties, such as the structures of omertà in certain Southern Italian and Sicilian secret societies (‘the code forbidding any discussion of mob business with outsiders’ (De Stefano, 2006: 136)), and most definitely into a deviant way of being – an excess of the social, of the homoerotic and of the violently masculine. As Tony Montana declares extravagantly in Scarface, ‘[T]he only thing in this world that gives orders is balls’. Undoubtedly, balls ‘give orders’ metonymically and hysterically in these and countless other gangster films. We might ask, in turn, what or who might order and disorder the spaces of gangster masculinity. ¹²

While sexual deviancy is not central to Scarface and American Me in an obvious manner, it is worth considering the valence of deviant traits in both narratives. Atavistic violence surfaces in these films as the figure of an ancestral ethnic presence or trace, but it also announces the perverse difficulties that such lineages encounter in modern, middle-class dominated North America. The atavistic wound would reveal itself, one might say, under the guise of ethnic deficiency. In these gangster films, the wound appears, whether in the form of rape or of a ‘scarface’, as a trait that not only marks but also constitutes masculinity as ethnic. Wounded masculinities, in this instance, are narcissistically projected onto the spectres of political displacement, cultural disenfranchisement and existential homelessness in at least two different ways. On the one hand, the very notion of the ‘good home’ is hollowed in the penitentiary (a ‘bad home’) through the portrayal of typically homoerotic renditions of the infertile male body. On the other, the utopian projection of an ethnically different home onto the larger ethnoscape of an ideal ‘Americanness’ fails no less brutally in the various forms of female incarceration, constriction and exclusion that we witness, most exuberantly, in Scarface. As Dopico (2007) notes, ‘The exclusion of women as subjects and their function as thematic and plot devices also betrays their erasure as objects of desire in the film’s homosexual libidinal relations, which emerge only by implication and are foreclosed under the sign of penal violence’ (p. 228). While women are indeed erased as ‘objects of desire’ in American Me – this is not the case in Scarface – I want to argue that a broader perspective emerges as we consider how both male and female sexual desires are implicated in constructions of vice-ridden and, ultimately, sterile masculinities in both films. Male and female performative anxieties point centrally to a constitutive wound that both foregrounds and evokes reproductive homeliness as both immensely desirable and tragically unattainable.

Early in Scarface, Montana denies any suspicion of homosexuality in emphatically macho and overtly homophobic terms. Yet, in the tradition of Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), his appetite for power and control over women is entangled with a conspicuous homoerotic attachment to his Cuban buddy Manny. ¹³ In American Me, Santana’s experiences in and out of jail are interlaced with the affective intensity of a protracted homoerotic bond with his White (and Spanish-speaking) boy J.D. (Steve Wilcox as young J.D./William Forsythe as adult J.D.). ¹⁴ Regardless of the conclusions that one may draw from Santana’s homoerotic liaisons, the biopic highlights a troubled masculinity through its graphic portrayal of several instances of rape. Rape, as I pointed out earlier, appears at the very onset of the film’s historical flashback of the 1943 ‘Zoot Suit’ riots. When another inmate rapes Santana at knifepoint during his first night in ‘juvie hall’ (juvenile detention centre), he retaliates by confronting his rapist and stabbing him to death with the same knife that had been used to immobilize him, thus exerting a symbolic vengeance while another inmate whispers: ‘kill him, kill him’. When, out of jail at the end of the film’s first half, Santana has sex with a woman for the first time, we see the lovemaking interspersed with fragments of flashback sequences from another male rape. As Santana tries to sodomize his girlfriend Julie (Dyana Ortelli) and rapes her (she cries ‘No! Stop it!’), we witness how the rapist in the parallel sequences sodomizes his victim with a monstrously shaped, multi-blade knife.

Referring to the scene where White sailors rape Santana’s mother, Dopico (2007) writes,

[T]he allusions to a Mexican genealogy of cultural rape and its unrepresentability is linked to the general erasure or selective instrumentalization of women in the film’s plot and in its dystopic realism which explores but does not condemn the structure of a defensively homosocial world. (p. 228)

The women that the films ask us to imagine can never fit adequately in these men’s lives, however persistently they are instrumentalized. Barred from reproductive homeliness, these women appear to be implicated in a poetics of alarming male infertility precluding female access to ‘normal’ (‘middle-class’ and/or ‘Latin’) social and reproductive mores.

Santana’s girlfriend Julie in American Me and Montana’s Cuban mother in Scarface (Miriam Colón) function as at best heroic amplifiers for the higher moral truths of common decency, class and cultural assimilation. As virtuous mothers and sisters, they also embody (and are constrained by) appropriately subdued, non-threatening forms of ethnic pride. Elvira, however, plays a more stereotypical role as a sexual object to drug lords, tragically performing an ethics of dependence and addiction as well as complicity in the mob game. Santana’s sister Gina, however, is presented as an innocent variety of the victimized gangster lover. She is almost raped in a men’s toilet and dies tragically in the end, a martyred casualty caught in a violent situation that transcends her, in a sense like Santana’s parents in American Me. All these women seem confined to domestic situations and spaces requiring them to remain docile and readily available for use, yet they are either potentially or effectively complicit in the chain of corruption. In tune with gangster film requirements, Scarface and American Me allegorize specifically masculine Latino experiences and inadequately American diasporic homes.

Transitional spaces: From Scarface to American Me

Reflecting on the polysemic values of ‘home’, Priscilla Wald ([2008] 1995) has articulated the discursive, cultural and material limits of ‘Americanness’ in these terms:

An official story of ‘a people’ invariably lags behind the seismic demographic changes and corresponding untold stories that ultimately compel each revision. A national narrative must make the concept of a ‘home’ for ‘a people’ appear intrinsic and natural rather than contingent and, ultimately, fictive. At the same time, that narrative must make the concept of home able to accommodate both changing and contested frontiers and the mobility within its borders. ‘Home’ must be sufficiently elastic to incorporate the local into the national: it must, in effect, be unhomelike. (p. 299)

Although gangster films are typically conceptualized as an American genre, gangster types are guaranteed to resurface in a staggering array of space–time contexts. In Scarface, American Me and a number of other US Latino gangster films, the geography typically includes carefully codified referents that are sometimes illustrated and developed through mise-en-abîme, such as Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and a variety of Central American locations. I am calling these and other geographic and ethnocultural referents transitional spaces.

Towards the end of the first hour in Scarface, we are transported to Latin America via an unexpected Andean-sounding tune and the words ‘Cochabamba, Bolivia’, as the camera zooms into the middle section of a steep mountain valley. For the crucial next few minutes, we will be given a visually clichéd tour of an important cocaine-producing operation. More importantly, we will be immersed into the locative complexities of drug lord transnationalism. The smooth Mr Sosa is looking for a partner who will open up a market for his product in the United States, and Montana will take this opportunity to represent his boss Frank López beyond the call of duty. The refined mansion – another trope in gangster films – is here appropriately cast as a colonial villa, lushly built around central patios, colonnades and running water. Drug business negotiations can therefore be conducted immersed in birdsong and surrounded by luscious tropical vegetation. Montana suggests Panama as a middle point in importing the product into US territory, and stays at the mansion while Frank’s man of trust, Omar Suárez, proceeds to Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Miami. But Mr Sosa learns that Omar was once a chivato, a police informer, and we then see Omar hanging from a helicopter. The situation prompts another of Montana’s macho statements: ‘Let’s get this straight now. I never fucked anybody over in my life who didn’t have it coming … All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one’. This is the crucial moment when Sosa, Montana’s nemesis in the film’s unexpected denouement, says, ‘Just remember. I’ll only tell you one time. Don’t fuck me, Tony. Don’t you ever try to fuck me’.

The transitional spaces in Scarface mark a passage from colonial, politically restless and demographically infectious places to the idealized space of the well-adjusted nation. The detention centre that figures at the beginning of the film ‘contains’ and soon ‘discharges’ the masses of the undesirable in Castro’s Cuba. This masculine, overcrowded penitentiary body is about to be discharged into the nation’s arteries, as the camp’s mise en scène of low-angle and panoramic shots and its location underneath America’s highways allegorically illustrates. As if grounded in this foundational scene of murder and revenge against political corruption, the male protagonist and his story unravel and spiral from this transitional point. But Montana’s true criminal self is more firmly rooted in the famously gruesome motel sequence by the beach. ¹⁵ Framed by scenic views of a lush, tropical Miami Beach accented by an atmosphere of expensive cars and littoral eroticism, the ‘gore’ scene demonstrates the unfathomable extremes of Latin gangster violence, involving brutally sadistic Colombians and Cubans, and displaying a minutely detailed bloodbath that includes guns, an electric saw and the uncannily transitional device of a TV set.

Well into the film, we find out a deeper truth about Montana’s Cuban roots than what was revealed during the border interrogation. He is now well settled in Miami and things are looking up for him as a drug gangster on the rise. In a rare melodramatic moment, he drives his idiosyncratic Cadillac convertible into a modest suburban neighbourhood, as a high-angle camera descends slowly, panning over a melancholy sunset. The soundtrack is at this point softly sad and melodic. Santana is about to visit his mother and his little sister Gina, who are also settled in Miami. He has not been in touch in 5 years, and as he stands at the doorstep to the humble bungalow, we see moving close-ups of mother and son:

– Mamá.

– Antonio.

– Long time.

– No postcards from jail, ah?

– Coño. ¡Gina!

While we wait for the tense emotional reunion with the mother (now a factory worker) to transform into open confrontation, we witness in a series of close-ups and medium shots Gina’s and Montana’s delight at the reunion. We also witness how he perversely seduces his willing and innocent sister. He gives her a golden heart-shaped pendant containing a small rose, and on the back the inscription ‘To Gina from Tony Always’. The consequences of this seduction will unravel and come to a tragic conclusion at the end of the film in a vampire-style scene, when Gina offers herself to her brother while shooting at him. But the mise en scène is just as telling as the elements of plot that structure the moment’s tense and sentimental ‘hominess’. Inside the house, a faded print of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus hangs on the bright blue wall to the left of the three standing figures. This image presides over the reunited family just as Montana deploys a self-satisfied ‘man of the house’ attitude, triggering Gina’s obsequious gender performance while the mother stands sceptically in the background.

Sitting in the modest kitchen in the next scene, Santana flashes his new affluent persona. He dons a large cigar, a white suit and open-neck black shirt. Invoking a brighter future for Gina, he offhandedly overrides her modest life plans as a junior college student and beauty parlour employee, and offers his mother US$1000. This scene, like the previous one, is presided by the mother, who now stands looking serious and grave, and by an image of Santa Bárbara or the Afro-Cuban orisha Changó, the Yoruba god of thunder and justice, a paternal figure presiding over the family home that also bespeaks the absence of a father. The mother responds to Montana’s gestures by relentlessly accusing him of lying: ‘it’s Cubans like you who are giving a bad name to our people’. Unable to dwell, and to further manipulate his position in the only place left to connect him with his Cuban family, Montana traverses yet another transitional space and moves on to his gangster homelessness.

In American Me, viewers and protagonists experience the neighbourhood or barrio as a liminal space that functions as the realm of past memories and vague referential gestures. It is the place of family life, romantic possibility and unlikely personal redemption. Yet, as a space of communal engagement and social cohesiveness, the open ground of the barrio remains transitory at best, standing as a threshold for the complex scenarios of life-long incarceration. ¹⁶ One set of secluded prison spaces leads to another as the social and political life of ‘La Eme’ unfolds through the lives of Santana and his close associates. The transition from the almost total darkness of the rape scene to the open daylight of the sports facilities inside the juvenile detention centre could not be more eloquent. A subjective camera shows us into the premises to the upbeat tune of ‘Rockin’ Robin’, past a dynamic field of teenage Chicanos paradoxically on the move, while Santana leads his gang following the receding camera. The voiceover states,

Killing that first night got me the worst that juvie got to offer: An extended sentence with a guaranteed bus ride to the big time as soon as I turned eighteen. But the respect I earned made me think I’d found the answer.

One year later, still in the bright California light of ‘juvie’, Santana welcomes his White, Spanish-speaking and Chicano-acting homeboy J.D., ‘my best crime partner’, as he introduces the boy to his jail gang.

Santana instructs J.D. on the differences between Chicano street gangs outside (‘ain’t no barrios in here, man’) and inside ‘juvie,’ naming the main groups that define prison gang life for the rest of the film: Blacks, Whites, Mexicans (‘it’s one big clica’ [gang]). As J.D., Santana, Mundo (the gang’s third founding member, played by Richard Coca and Pepe Serna) and the other boys play ball in the courtyard, their movements turn to slow motion and blend with the next scene, now a shade darker but still happening in broad daylight and in a similar space. To the tune of ‘Shotgun’ by Los Lobos, we see the rubric ‘Folsom State Prison’ as the camera follows the ball from a high wall down to Santana, J.D. and Mundo, now playing as grown men several years later. There are now references to the Black Guerrilla Family, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Eme, as the camera captures a landscape of different ethnic groups and registers the architectural elements of armed, high-security surveillance. But just as we take a fuller measure of the legendary Folsom complex through a visual rhetoric of vertical and aerial panoramas, the voiceover tells us, ‘The Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerrilla Family shared the yard. But Folsom belonged to us, the oldest clica, La Eme, the Mexican Mafia’.

The hero in American Me lives in a spectral, endlessly transitional version of Americanness, a space of seclusion, confessional paranoia and affective degradation where ethnic minorities resist and survive on the wrong side of the American experience. As a Mexican American who does not have US citizenship, he is also a post-colonial Latin American. Paradoxically, born in Los Angeles, he is also a subject of symbolic and physical rape. Indeed, the experience of rape and its traumatic aftermaths will haunt him through the series of confined environments that end up defining much of his adult life. Perhaps as a result of an enforced homosocial life, a presumably heterosexual Santana has sex with a woman only in his mid-30s.

American Me suggests that Mexican Americans living in East Los Angeles inhabit a transitional ethnoscape that remains both spatially peripheral and historically external to ‘Americanness’ because they are both anterior and external to processes of national constitution. ¹⁷ The only ‘home’ that Santana knows is figured tensely through the experience of violent and irreparable loss in the flashback to 1943. As Wald ([2008] 1995) writes in the quotation at the opening of this section: “‘Home’ must be sufficiently elastic … it must, in effect, be unhomelike’ (p. 299). The transitional spaces of US Latino gangster films would seem to fit the bill almost uncannily.

Excess spaces: Homeless monsters

In a section of Scarface simply labelled ‘Three Months Later’, the camera descends from a bright blue sky onto the joyous sounds of a crowded Miami Beach day. It continues to pan slowly from the sky and sea across the beach to a pleasantly idyllic poolside terrace. Gone are the days of drudgery, when Montana and Manny had to move uneasily through the transitional spaces of interrogation rooms, immigrant camp and cheap Cuban joint. They did the dirty job at the motel, but can now envisage a new life, as their relaxed fresh looks indicate. The scene, however, is as much an indication of the fleshy reality of the American dream as a deceiving prelude to all the excess to come. As the two men drink out of coconut and watermelon cups sharing such humorous sexual obscenities as ‘this town [is] like a great big pussy waiting to get fucked’, Montana tells Manny: ‘This is paradise. This is paradise, I’m telling you …’ What paradise stands for is revealed in the next sentence: ‘I’m telling you, I should’ve come here ten years ago. I’d have been a millionaire by this time. By this time, I’d have my own boat, my own car, my own golf course’. Manny (very much Montana’s buffoon throughout the film) tries his ‘cunnilingus’ pick-up line on a White woman he likes to disastrous effects, the woman slapping his face, ‘you’re sick!’, and Manny retorting: ‘Hey, you know, if I wasn’t a nice guy I’d crack you … bitch, lesbian!’. At this point, Montana once again imparts wisdom: ‘This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman. That’s why you gotta make your own moves’.

This dystopic vision of a Cuban American ‘paradise’ is traversed by stereotypes of the presumptuous ‘Latin lover’ and Cuban gigolo. ¹⁸ It is also grotesquely overblown by the voyeuristic effects of dirty talk and excessive gender performativity. The very presence of these men, with their identification of paradise with available (presumably White) women and sex on demand, demonstrates the ambivalent game at work throughout the entire film, in which the boundaries of an ethnosocial ‘here’ and ‘there’ are constantly invoked through the construction of a well-groomed natural space (‘paradise’) versus a deviant and ill-conceived Latin American presence in US soil (‘hell’), in which a legitimate ambition for boat, car and golf course goes hand in hand with a coarse desire for money, power and woman. Montana’s project amounts to an ideological grid or discursive shorthand for some of the ways in which Latinos are seen in US films, popular and visual cultures as the agents and products of an excessive tropicality that exhibits and flashes its sexual desire and economic greed, overflowing the set boundaries and prescribed mores of an ideal Americanness. ¹⁹

I bring my fragmentary readings of Scarface and American Me to a close by invoking the notion of the monstrum as a sign, a kind of warning or omen indicating a future event. In ethnocentric fantasies of an idealized Latino ‘America’, the gangster or monster signals beyond the limits of a prescribed ethnoscape in decidedly narcissistic and phallocentric gestures, yet only to fail invariably in his efforts to reach a space beyond the contact zone. His efforts to move – to gang – in any specific direction are brutally arrested. Mandy Merck reminds us that ‘the American cinema has developed across a century and more of economic, political and cultural crises, which it has variously repressed, addressed and imaginatively surmounted in its successive iterations of the nation’s name’ (Merck, 2007: 19–20). The gangsters that I have read here as figures that are articulated in and through the varieties of filmic spatiality appear as the wounded and disfigured, blemished or undone faces of the ‘Latin male’, a broken anti-hero that can also be identified in its more recent renditions with images of the international thug or terrorist – I am thinking of Javier Bardem’s role as Raoul Silva, that monstrously elusive cosmopolitan villain in one of the latest Bond films, Skyfall (2012).

The monstrum, then, demonstrates and exhibits our togetherness as a well-adjusted society and as a viewing public. But more fundamentally, it provides us with mythical or archetypical tools to explore the darker, non-rational energies and forces luring in society’s most vulnerable margins. The kinds of enjoyment that these films incite and excite are perhaps entirely subjective, but we do know how they are configured as a genre and as a structure of types. The gangster/monster exhibits the bodies, affects and social traits that we cannot safely access. The hidden and overwhelming trigger of much of the drama in these films might be a shared desire for social hegemony in which the viewing public is expected to exist as a complicit silent majority of perversely judgemental yet lascivious spectators hiding in flickering twilight.

The Latin lives variously and asymmetrically narrated in Scarface and American Me invite us to reconsider how gang and gangster, male sociability and female caricature, gangster and monster, continue to address the genres of both US and non-US, national, transnational and diasporic film. The excessive going-nowhere that these and myriad gang(ster) films address and problematize contrasts with current Latino/a realities in flux, whose wildly diverse ethnoscapes and material cultures of mobility are but the result of the longer, dynamic fluctuations that these films register anxiously and distortedly.