Backlash Redux

Last Friday Maureen Dowd wrote an editorial for the New York Times describing the tendency of men to prefer subservient women who are caretakers to accomplished, successful women. She discussed the popularity of these portrayals in recent Hollywood cinema, with Spanglish as her test case.

As the daughter of a successful and loving single mother as well as a woman of partially Latin American descent, my objections to Spanglish are legion.

First, as Dowd argues, the Mexican mother-as-maid (Paz Vega) is pitted against the cold-career-woman-white mother (Tea Leoni) for the love of their mutual daughters (Shelbie Bruce and Sarah Steele) and the love of Leoni’s husband (Adam Sandler). In this equation, Leoni appears to be the woman who got it all wrong; her perfectionism and career focus has made her an insensitive mother and an unloving, self-absorbed wife. Meanwhile, Vega becomes the very ideal of the loving, caring mother with whom Sandler falls in love. Women are taught a very cool lesson here, either be a subservient, sensitive, passionate caretaker, or be a cold, self-absorbed, career woman who could lose her husband to her maid.

This tale is made all the worse because of the particular stereotypes now attached to Latina women-as-maids: fiery passion (she yells at Sandler in Spanish at one point) paired with subservience to their men and profound maternal instinct (largely because of the stereotype that Latino males are absentee fathers, also played upon in this movie as I will discuss momentarily).

The involvement of Vega’s daughter (Shelbie Bruce) in the tale only adds to my disgust. The entire movie is narrated through the prism of the daughter’s application essay to Princeton. When Vega moves in with the family for the summer, Bruce is quite charmed by Leoni, who manages to get Bruce a scholarship to the prestigious private high school Leoni’s own children attend. Leoni and Bruce, both strong and intelligent women, seem to find quite the affinity with each other. Meanwhile, Vega rails against it and eventually quits her job in part because she wants to insure that Bruce ends up like her and not like Leoni. Bruce then narrates in her essay that an acceptance to Princeton would not define her because her identity is rooted in her mother. While I agree that an acceptance to Princeton should not define anyone’s life, rooting her identity as being Vega especially in contrast to Leoni is to accept the myth of Western society perpetuated in this film: men can have it all, women can’t. And listen well, Latinas, remaining true to your culture means not being learned or successful; it means remembering your place in structures of white patriarchal dominance. As Musa Dube said of Pocahontas, Vega and Bruce’s characters are clearly the products of the colonizer’s pen.

The glaring abuse of the colonizer’s pen deepens when employing the stereotype of the macho Latino father who abandoned Vega and Bruce. His absence only serves to demonstrate Sandler’s unstoppable goodness as the successful, loving, white male father who did not desert his cruel wife even after she cheated on him.

I would not be as angered by this narrative if its portrayals were not such an accepted part of the reality I live. Many men I encounter assume this tale reveals a deep truth; an intelligent learned woman cannot be spiritual, passionate, or maternal. I have to disagree with this since my mother, who was a better mother than many stay-at-home moms I’ve heard of, is successful, learned, spiritual, passionate, and an excellent mother. Latino men are often erased from narratives as Latino/as are being broadly integrated (not just in CA, NY, or TX) into the front lines of the culture wars; with the re-election of Bush partially thanks to 44% of Latino/as, they are only bound to become more prominent.

What is most perennially upsetting to me is the way that women have always historically been pitted against each other, a strategy that could not work if women did not fall for it. I know a woman who chose not to pursue graduate work because she feared it would prevent her from having a husband and children. I fear that the anti-feminists have already won when we ourselves buy into these things.