Stereotypes In High Noon

From our previous film showing, High Noon, we got a taste of how the Western genre portrayed Chicano/a characters. The late 1970’s saw a decline of the western, and “with the decline of the filmic western came the rise of the urban violence film” (Cortés 134). The 1980’s and 90’s saw film after film released portraying gang violence, and the Latino gang film was a “natural crossroads for sex, violence, and ethnicity” (Cortés 135). Some see these Latino gang members “as updated, modern variants of the Mexican bandit type” (Treviño).

1993 brought us the film Mi Vida Loca, which shows us the life of teenage Chicano/a gang members living in Echo Park, focused on the character known as Sad Girl. She and her former best friend Mousey have both had a child with the same boy, Ernesto, and plan to fight to the death over him. However, Ernesto is the one who ends up dying in a drug deal gone wrong, and the women in his life are left to figure out how to keep their community together.

Machismo is so much more than a word we use to describe the behavior of misogynists. Anglo communities often apply the word solely to male individuals of Latin heritage, and use the term to apply a racist stereotype of the hot-blooded Latino. “Machismo is hardly original or essential to Mexico and Latin America,” and as we see portrayed by the women of Mi Vida Loca, machismo is not necessarily exclusive to men (Gutman 479). That said, the machismo of these female characters is different to that of their male counterparts- as Sad Girl says in voiceover near the end of the movie, “Women don’t use weapons to prove a point. Women use weapons for love,” to keep the ones they care for safe