Via tvguide.com
I was having a chuckle this week of who I get compared to in the looks department. They’re never white women. In high school, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore was shot near my house, and my classmates flocked to work as extras in his film. For a while, I was often asked if I had played the role of Margaret Yang in the film- to which a high school version of me bares a striking similarity.
And while I certainly grew up in close proximity to a golf course, attended a National Blue Ribbon public school, drove an Acura Integra for my first car– I realized I merely identified with being “white” because of my economic background– as opposed to my family heritage. My father is white. My mother was raised in Honduras but is Colombian.
This gave me a vaguely exotic look, which for whatever reason caused my school peers in about 5th grad to ask if I was Chinese and then proceed to make “slanted eyes” at me. (I guess this is excused via the recent Miley Cyrus debacle.)
Until my arrival in Chicago I had not done too much meditating on my race. Recently, I was workshopping with a producer from WBEZ. She bemoaned all of her volunteers and interns being from Brown and University of Chicago and wanted to know how to pull in someone else. I think during the workshop people looked to me as some sort of a “diversity story”– but, as I mentioned at the start of this entry, I’m merely a token. The opportunities available were plenty.
As I started working more around Chicago, I noticed things like… in the museum community minorities were typically security and food service on the museum premiss. Or, the the bus run in my North Shore neighborhood that appears to only be used by minority women working as maids and nannies.
I don’t have much of a heritage associate with my mother’s half of the family. Mainly, I had a few trips to Honduras that usually included a large house party complete with a visiting mariachi band competing with the sound of cadged parrots that my grandmother kept. But returning to the class issue again the trips to Honduras were in the best parts of Tegupicgalpa and I stayed in a gorgeous house with tropical greenery and an open air area with hammocks.
So I’m noticing things in film now. The way minority women are treated. And I have to say they’re a tad fetishized. I am no stranger to that treatment. I attended a small private college in Northeast Georgia, where I met a male classmate that was so fascinated by “colored women” as he put it, he would chase down the handfull of us attending school there.
I was so young, I thought how novel. I’m old now, and I think– how creepy. The want for an exotic woman. And she indeed has a prominent role in screenplays. This woman. I think of Penelope Cruz as being this tiny-voiced muse who makes funny expressions, but does her character go beyond that? Or let’s just take a Penelope Cruz archetype and place her in the film Spanglish. The spanish maid winning the heart of Adam Sandler’s character, who is less than charmed with his strong, independent blond wife.
Via amctv.com
Or on 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy’s fascination and crazy love for Elisa, the medical assistant who is played by Selma Hayek Of course, she’s poor and working two jobs. Mad Men goes there Paul Kinsey brings his black girlfriend to a house party and Joan chastises him as trying to make a statement, rile things up– a faux societal rebellion. Or even better, why is Don Draper’s wife the pinnacle of entitled blond farm girls, and yet he slinks away with brunettes, Jewish women and even waves off a Chinese call girl “not tonight.” A muted exoticism.
Where is the blond muse/mistress/second class lady? I am only conjuring a frightening Glenn Close, but maybe you can help me on this one. I can’t help but conjure the Foucault books from high school debate analyzing sex and power structures. I don’t know if it’s so much about exoticism and a preference for a certain look as it is… a woman from the “wrong side of the tracks” someone who needs a man to save her. Very Disney Princess like.
Returning to the Margaret Yang episode– I was reading this funny essay in Shameless Magazine: Wes Anderson: The Ultimate Heartbreaker.
You’ll see what I mean.