Yearning to Belong, Drawn to Be Mexican

This essay analyzes two contemporary Hollywood films-Fools Rush In (1997) and McFarland, USA (2015)-to highlight the mainstream imaginary of the relationship between Mexicanness and whiteness. We argue that these fi lms reveal how the existence and persistence of an emotionally impoverished whiteness becomes visible beside, against, and through Mexican affective fullness. We develop the term "white lack" to represent how whiteness, in all its modernity and focus on individual autonomy, is exposed as incomplete and even insufficient once it knows and "feels" the warmth and abundance of Mexicanness. We show that the political logics of white lack reveal a yearning not just for human connection but also for a different social order and relationship to place. Yet even as these fi lms gesture toward moments of interracial harmony and anticapitalist possibilities, they both retain the centrality of the white hegemonic gaze; indeed, Mexican affective fullness must be contained and reabsorbed into the body of whiteness by the end of each film

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Autonomy · Centrality · Epistemology · Harmony (color) · Hegemony · Hollywood · Mainstream · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Visual arts · Critical Race Theory in Education · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology