Diasporic and marginal crossroads: The films of Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Original Artic le

Diasporic and marginalcrossroads: The fi lms ofFrances Negron-Muntaner

Yeidy M. RiveroUniversity of Michigan, Michigan.

Abstract In this article, I highlight Frances Negron-Muntaner’s career as anindependent filmmaker, and also examine the ongoing pressures that she has enduredbecause of her membership in various marginalized groups. I propose that insteadof labeling Negron-Muntaner under the rubric of some of her identities, we situateher and her films as part of what film scholar Hamid Naficy categorizes as accentedcinema. By describing Negron-Muntaner as an accented filmmaker, I am interpretingher films not as essential depictions of a particular community or of herself, butas personal journeys that operate through and ‘‘play’’ with her multiple identitypositionings.Latino Studies (2009) 7, 336–356. doi:10.1057/lst.2009.26

Keywords: Puerto Rican diaspora; accented cinema; Latina queer identities; Latino/acommunities; history

Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with

some of its constituting parts missing. (Trouillot, 1995, 49)

I begin with the words of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, not just

to replicate a debate that has occupied academic circles since the 1970s, but also

to bring to the forefront cathartic moments when individuals become aware

of previously silenced histories. These are those instances in which we, as

r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 7, 3, 336–356www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/

people trained in the ‘‘banking pedagogical model,’’ suddenly discover that

what we have learned about a particular period, event or group is only part

of the story (Freire, 1999, 71–86), or that history is a grossly disfigured

depiction of the past, a distortion that has shaped and is shaped by the

present.

For some of us, this awakening might have been spawned by a lecture given

by a professor, by reading a book or by watching a play or a film. For others, an

encounter with an individual from a marginalized community or group might

have served as the spark for questioning what are deemed as historical facts.

And of course, for many, the silences in history become more prevalent if

we, as actors within a particular cultural, historical and social context, and

as subjects aware of our voices and stories, are totally erased from the process

of historical production. It is precisely within this context of history, silences,

the personal and the political that I situate the films of Frances Negron-

Muntaner.

Since the late 1980s, director, scriptwriter, producer and scholar Negron-

Muntaner has used documentary film as a radical media tool to delve into issues

of homophobia, machismo, racism, colonization, migration, identity and

culture. Influenced by the late 1960s and early 1970s Chicano and Puerto

Rican filmmakers’ tradition of utilizing the camera as a ‘‘weapon’’ to fight

discrimination and human rights injustices (Jimenez, 1996; Noriega, 2000),

Negron-Muntaner’s films attempt to recount untold stories, to reinterpret

history and social realities, as well as to portray the faces, voices and lives of

marginal communities. From capturing the AIDS epidemic in a poverty-stricken

Puerto Rican community in North Philadelphia (AIDS in the Barrio: Eso no

me pasa a mi), to deconstructing and condemning homophobia, anti-Black

racism and binary identity constructions entrenched in Puerto Rican and US

hegemonic cultures (Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican), to

negotiating her cultural and political position as a colonized subject (Puerto

Rican ID, 1995) to scrutinizing the destitute living conditions of some members

of Puerto Rican communities in Philadelphia and the flaws of the American

dream myth (Homeless Diaries, 1996a), Negron-Muntaner has articulated a

previously absent Puerto Rican queer/lesbian subjectivity and at the same time

opened dialogic spaces for themes usually silenced in discussions about Puerto

Ricanness, both on the island and in the diaspora.

In this article, I perform a close reading of three of Negron-Muntaner’s

cinematic works (Brincando el charco, Puerto Rican ID and Homeless Diaries),

paying particular attention to her body/selves in her work. By interweaving

body, self and work, I am both highlighting Negron-Muntaner’s career as

a filmmaker and also mapping her as a dislocated creator whose cultural artifacts

function through ongoing negotiations of hers and others’ expectations. As

a filmmaker with ties to numerous groups, Negron-Muntaner’s ethnicity,

gender, sexual orientation, race, cultural capital and class acquire distinct

Diasporic and marginal crossroads

337r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 7, 3, 336–356

significations in various interpretative communities in both her homeland

(Puerto Rico) and her host country (the United States). Her selves and others’

imposed identities and ideologies in these complex sites create burdens of

representation, wherein her films are understood as representative of the

constituencies that she is or should be a part of and/or the ideological stances

that she embraces or should embrace. In this article, I propose that instead of

placing Negron-Muntaner under the rubric of some of her identities (as a born

and raised Puerto Rican, middle-class, educated, light-skinned, Latina lesbian

documentary filmmaker and scholar who lives in the United States), we situate

her and her films as part of what Hamid Naficy (2001) categorizes as accented

cinema.

For Naficy, accented films ‘‘signify and signify upon exile and diaspora by

expressing, allegorizing, commenting upon, and critiquing the home and host

societies and cultures and the deterritorialized conditions of the filmmaker’’ (4).

Through self-reflexivity and in some cases self-inscription (the inclusion of the

filmmaker’s voice or ‘‘real’’/fictional body presence in the narrative), accented

films ‘‘cross many borders and engage in many deterritorializing and

reterritorializing journeys, which take several forms, including home-seeking

journeys, journeys of homelessness, and homecoming journeys’’ (5). More than

portraying a stable geographical and temporal place, home, and homeland, or

a singularized all-encompassing identity constrained by nationality, ethnicity,

race, gender or sexuality, accented films are ‘‘personal and unique’’ because they

are ‘‘authorial and autobiographical’’ (34).

Whereas accented cinema does not translate into an integrated and

unwavering group of films, Naficy establishes distinctions among three

sometimes intertwined, sometimes disparate types of filmmakers and films:

the exilic, the diasporic and the ethnic. The exilic filmmakers tend to define ‘‘all

things in their lives not only in relation to the homeland but also in strictly

political terms’’ (12). Although, according to Naficy, most exilic filmmakers

fetishize the homeland, some also criticize or create an uncertain depiction of

their home and host country. Similar to the exilic, the diasporic author addresses

the movement from the homeland to a foreign/host country. However, contrary

to exilic films that might be ‘‘individualistic or collective,’’ the diasporic are

collective (14). Through their films, the diasporic authors/filmmakers generate

affinities with compatriots in their homeland, in the filmmakers’ host country

and in other geographical locations. As a result of their diasporic collective

identity and their memories of the past, diasporic authors ‘‘often idealize the

homeland or the homeland yet to come’’ (14). Finally, the ethnic authors focus

on their ‘‘ethnic and racial identity within the host country’’ (15). The ethnic

filmmaker (like the exilic and the diasporic) is usually an immigrant her/himself

or, in the case of the United States (and the West), the offspring of non-White

emigre parents. What differentiates the ethnic from the exilic and diasporic

filmmaker is that the ethnic author’s cinematic production exclusively centers

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on the filmmaker’s ‘‘selves’’ in relation to her/his present life in her/his country

of residence.

While the exilic, the diasporic and the ethnic clusters encompass various

subgroups and even though these three categories are ‘‘fluid processes that [ y ]

may transform into one another and beyond’’ (Naficy, 2001, 17), each type

articulates specific themes about the author’s identities, her/his relation to the

homeland, to the host society and to her/his past, present or future. As Naficy

(2001) writes

Exilic cinema is dominated by its focus on there and then in the homeland,

diasporic cinema by its vertical relationship to the homeland and by its

lateral relationship to the diaspora communities and experiences, and

postcolonial ethnic and identity cinema by the exigencies of life here and

now in the country in which the filmmakers reside. (15)

Most importantly, accented films represent the literal and symbolic travels

and border crossings of the author/filmmaker. Hence, by describing Negron-

Muntaner as an accented filmmaker who has moved between the exilic and

the ethnic throughout her cinematic career, I am reading her films not as an

essential portrayal of a particular community or of herself, but as personal

journeys that operate through and play with her multiple identity posi-

tionings (Hall, 2000). Furthermore, in categorizing Negron-Muntaner as an

accented cinema author, I am also calling attention to the relationship bet-

ween her films and her social, political and cultural locations, in particular

historical moments, as well as highlighting her ‘‘performance of self’’ (Naficy,

2001, 238).

One of the main problems that Negron-Muntaner has encountered as

a filmmaker is that through her self-inscription, her cinematically constructed

personae have been read as real and static depictions of herself. Whereas all of

her filmic performances might relate to aspects in her life, the reality associated

with each one of her filmic presences creates a one-dimensional idea of who

Negron-Muntaner supposedly is. Nonetheless, if one examines the body/selves

in her work, one is able to capture the variety of Negron-Muntaner’s

representations. In fact, while decoded as real, each of her accented films

creates a character. The meanings inscribed in each of these similar yet distinct

characterizations illustrate the variations, the journeys and the performances of

identities. Therefore, by placing Negron-Muntaner as an accented filmmaker,

I am foregrounding the performative aspect in her films and her identity

movements throughout her films.

Lastly, in a broader sense, my analysis of Negron-Muntaner’s work through

the lens of Naficy’s (2001) accented cinema theories attempts to engage with

and at the same time expand Chon Noriega and Ana Lopez’s (1996) call to

consider Latino films and videos ‘‘through the matrix of differential histories’’



that sometimes ‘‘fluctuate among interrelated histories’’ (xiii). In other words,

in addition to following Noriega and Lopez’s proposition to examine the ways

in which Latino/a filmic texts operate within and across ethnic, panethnic,

sexual, gendered, racial, local and transnational affiliations, Naficy’s accented

cinema allows us to analyze how – through her/his creative work – the Latina/o

filmmaker negotiates particular labels and political stands assigned to them by

a community or group. In the case of Negron-Muntaner, even though she

has been categorized and has categorized herself as part of the Latina/o film

and video canon (note, for example, her article on Latino gay and lesbian

independent film/video (1996b) in which she reviews Brincando el charco, and

her active participation in the National Association of Latino Independent

Producers), her cinematic characters directly and indirectly reject the panethnic

Latino/a construct. Consequently, Negron-Muntaner’s films, similar to the

cinematic production of other Latina independent filmmakers such as Lourdes

Portillo and Ela Troyano, can also be viewed as another expression of the

diversity of the Latino experience (as Suzanne Oboler (1995) argues), as well as

the diversity of identities, struggles and ideological positions within a particular

ethnic group.

I begin my analysis with Negron-Muntaner’s 1994 film, Brincando el charco.

Although Brincando el charco is not Negron-Muntaner’s first film, with this

work she enters the realm of accented cinema. In Brincando el charco, the

‘‘here’’ and ‘‘there’’ and the ‘‘past,’’ ‘‘present’’ and ‘‘future’’ represent the

accented structure of feelings, that is, ‘‘the filmmakers’ profound experiences

of deterritorialization’’ (Naficy, 2001, 27). In both her new home (the United

States) and in her homeland (Puerto Rico), the fictional character Claudia

(also performed by Negron-Muntaner in the diegesis) feels fragmented and

dislocated, as she is required to perform identities that are not necessarily part

of her ‘‘self.’’

I s There A Definite Home for Puerto Rican Lesbians and Gays,Nuyoricans, Blacks and HIV Posit ive People?

Intermingling fiction with documentary, the 1994 work Brincando el charco:

Portrait of a Puerto Rican (a 57-minute film produced, directed and written by

Negron-Muntaner) focuses on Claudia, a Puerto Rican lesbian and photo-

grapher who migrated to the United States after being expelled from her

house by her homophobic father. Following the sudden death of her father,

Claudia has 72 hours to return to the island for his funeral. During these

3 days, Claudia ponders her life in Puerto Rico and in the United States.

Through Claudia’s lover, her friends and acquaintances, and her photographic

and video work, the audience is introduced to Claudia’s and other diasporic

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Puerto Ricans’ ongoing negotiations of issues of identity on the mainland and in

Puerto Rico.

Images of the Puerto Rican day parade (in Philadelphia) frame the beginning

of Brincando el charco, establishing the presence of the US Puerto Rican

diaspora and, symbolically, the US/Puerto Rico colonial relation. A female voice

accompanies these images and poses two questions: ‘‘who are we [as Puerto

Ricans] and what is our common destiny?’’ Yet, the ‘‘we’’ that the female will

attempt to disclose exceeds the realm of the nation while also claiming to be

part of it (although in drastically different and pluralistic ways). The ‘‘we’’ in

Brincando el charco is comprised of the various ‘‘us’’ that have been excluded

from the Puerto Rican and US nation/history.

The primary relegated ‘‘us’’ that the narrative presents are gays and lesbians.

Following the footage of the Puerto Rican day parade, a young man is seen

posing for a photographer, Claudia. Looking at the camera in a documentary

style interview, the model/participant recounts the anguish he felt by his family’s

rejection of his homosexuality. However, being a gay or a lesbian Latino/a does

not represent an immediate inclusion into the US White gay and lesbian

community. As Claudia soon discovers via a phone conversation with an editor,

to be marketed as a Latina/lesbian artist/photographer and to publish her work

she has to suppress her political commentary on colonialism.

The removal of gays and lesbians from the Puerto Rican national family is

weighed against the US gay and lesbian community’s marginalization of racial

and ethnic Others. Both in the Puerto Rican family and in the US gay and

lesbian public spheres, Puerto Rican and Latino gays have to create particular

performing acts while masquerading part of their ‘‘selves’’ in order to be

accepted. ‘‘I do not choose to be gay. Who wants to live a lifestyle where you are

a minority within a minority because I am Hispanic and I am gay?’’ the young

participant asks. Through the model/participant’s account and Claudia’s

experience with a gay White publisher, the narrative briefly illustrates the

ideological fissures of an all-encompassing local/transnational ethnic/racial queer

collective identity.

The documentary-style interview is interrupted by the ringing of a phone.

No actual phone is seen, but, as the narrative unfolds, the ringing phone and

phone conversations represent moments of rejection, confession, obligation,

trauma, transition and decision in Brincando el charco. A key stylistic device in

many accented films, epistolarity (via letters, phone, cassettes, answering

machines, emails and so on) and more specifically, exilic telephonic epistolaries

‘‘encode copresence and bifocality, which can serve critical functions by

juxtaposing incompatible and oppositional discourses, times, spaces, and foci in

ways that highlight their differences’’ (Naficy, 2001, 133). Claudia’s phone

conversation with the editor (rejection of her art and politics by the gay and

lesbian community) literally and allegorically interrupts her photographic and

political work; the ringing of an absent phone leads into Claudia’s disclosure of



her condition as an immigrant in the United States. ‘‘Seven years of voluntary

exile, far from familiar faces and landscapes,’’ Claudia’s voice recounts while we

see her sitting in a moving train. Images of winter (frozen bodies of water,

barren leafless trees and grayish buildings facades) foreground her condition of

‘‘anonymity and detachment’’, and concomitantly unveil her metaphorical

motions across various identity places and placings.

As a Puerto Rican lesbian who lives with her partner Ana (a US born and

raised Puerto Rican, lawyer and community activist), Claudia has established

a family and home in the United States. Still, even though she wants to represent

herself as ‘‘a body with multiple points of contacts,’’ her exilic and ethnic-racial-

sexual Otherness requires her to perform various contained roles. Whereas the

White gay community wanted to commodify Claudia exclusively as a Latina

lesbian photographer, the Latino community (via Ana) pushes her to play

another part, that of a Latina advocate. Even though Claudia openly rejects

involvement in Latino politics (by refusing to photograph a press conference for

a Latino candidate), Ana (and thus, the community) demands that she be

politically active (‘‘why do you have such a hard time doing anything for me?’’).

US ethnic minority/Latino politics impose an additional burden on Claudia’s

life, generating obstacles to reinventing herself freely.

According to Negron-Muntaner (1999a), the ‘‘marriage’’ between Ana and

Claudia symbolizes ‘‘making love’’ to the Puerto Rican diaspora, and subse-

quently broadens ‘‘the boundaries of Puerto Rican nationhood in geographic,

political, ethnic, and linguistic terms’’ (519). The Puerto Rican diaspora then

represents the second marginal ‘‘us’’ in Brincando el charco. This ‘‘us’’

articulates the exclusion of ‘‘Nuyoricans’’ (mainland Puerto Ricans) from the

territorial-based constructed ethnic family and from public discourses and

debates regarding the nation and its peoples. Still, besides ‘‘making love’’ to the

diaspora, the narrative’s inscription of Puerto Ricans in Latino politics

highlights the intercommunity among Latino groups. Thus, which of the

multiple identities printed on Claudia’s/Ana’s/the Puerto Rican body should

occupy center stage? Or, who should Claudia and Ana select as their ‘‘love

making’’ political, cultural and social partners?

Gilberto Blasini (1996) interprets the Ana and Claudia political confrontation

as an expression of ‘‘the differences that exist between those Puerto Ricans who

can choose to be part of an American racial/ethnic discourse once they migrate,

and those who are already inscribed in that discourse by being born in the US’’

(8). Blasini makes a valid point, especially if one considers that contrary to the

massive late 1940s and 1950s Puerto Rican migration, the post-1980s

migrations (generally characterized as a ‘‘brain drain’’) have been comprised,

for the most part, of people who possess cultural and economic capital and thus

have had better opportunities than previous immigrants. Yet, I would argue that

regardless of education and economic solvency, this new wave of Puerto Rican

immigrants has also become immersed in US ethnic minority politics and racial/

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ethnic discourses without actually having the public option to select their

identities. On the other hand, US born and raised Puerto Ricans also have to

negotiate between being Puerto Ricans on the mainland (an ethnic minority)

and being considered ‘‘American’’ or Americanized in Puerto Rico. That is

precisely why the Ana/Claudia confrontational scene and the creation of the

‘‘home of Ana and Claudia’’ (as their answering machine message announces)

are so revealing.

In this symbolic home (the highly convoluted space of Puerto Rican island-

based and diasporic politics), Claudia openly expresses her opinion about

Latino politics even though she knows that Ana (the Puerto Rican diaspora) will

disapprove of her words and demand action. Furthermore, in their ‘‘home,’’ Ana

later recounts her island-based relatives’ questioning of her ethnic authenticity

(because she did not speak Spanish ‘‘correctly’’), and she divulges the different

performing acts that she enacts when she is with island-based Puerto Ricans and

with ‘‘gringos’’ (‘‘When I am with gringos, I say I am Puerto Rican. When I am

with real Puerto Ricans, I say I am from New York’’). Claudia and Ana’s home

is not only the location where Puerto Ricans make love, but it is also the place

for open dialog, confessions and frustrations. Without this foreplay, neither

Claudia nor Ana could be satisfied. Equally important, Claudia demands a

broadened space for political ‘‘love’’ based on sexuality, race and a history of

collective struggles, while Ana purposely ‘‘plays’’ with her ethnicity, and thus

rejects a singularized-externally imposed identity label. In many respects, the

home of Ana and Claudia is where the ‘‘dirty laundry’’ is exposed in an attempt to

be symbolically cleaned.1 And it is precisely in their home and with both of them

present that Claudia receives the most transformative phone call of all, the call

that forces her to revisit her ‘‘relationship to place’’ (Puerto Rico, the United States

and the diasporic/marginal borders), to time (her ‘‘past, present, and future’’), and

to ‘‘reality (real, imagined, and remembered)’’ (Naficy, 2001, 134).

The third phone call in Brincando el charco announces the death of Claudia’s

father. This phone call dovetails with the previous call (rejection of her

commentary on colonialism) and the phone sound (confession of exile) in three

significant ways. On one level, the phone call influences Claudia to think about

her relationship with her father and to disclose her real motivation for her

‘‘voluntary exile.’’ As illustrated in a black and white flashback/memory

sequence, Claudia’s father threw her out of their home/house after discovering

some photographs of her lover. In the claustrophobic house, Claudia’s mother

and brother witness the father’s abusive treatment towards Claudia, but,

although both of them try to defend her, the father imposes his patriarchal

authority. In Claudia’s memory, the home/house is where she endured the full

brunt of her father’s hatred; yet, it was also a space where other family members

showed some support. Claudia’s relationship with her family/home transcends a

binary construction of hatred and love – there are still some familial connections

that influence her ‘‘present.’’

1 I am alluding to

Peter Feng’s (2000)

definition of ‘‘dirty

laundry’’ as ‘‘the

process of

justifying

suppression within

a minority

community as a

protective stance

toward outsiders’’

(p. 2).



On another level, as several scholars have discussed, the death of Claudia’s

father ‘‘kills’’ the patriarchal, homophobic, racist, Catholic-repressive island-based

national culture (Blasini, 1996; La Fountain-Stokes, 1999; Sandoval-Sanchez,

2007). More specifically, it destroys Puerto Rico’s 1930s radical nationalistic

movement that constructed ‘‘the family, religion [Catholic], culture, language

[Spanish], and history’’ as sites of resistance against US colonialism and the

1950s political rhetoric of the newly established Commonwealth government’s

reconfiguration of Puerto Rico’s cultural nationalism (Silen, 1980, 249). By

killing the national father, Claudia and other Puerto Ricans (Blacks, gays,

Nuyoricans, HIV positives and recent immigrants) begin to express their

sometimes-thorny relationship with the homeland.

Lastly, the third phone call opens discussions about colonial subjectivities in

both Puerto Rican and US public spheres. Whereas Claudia’s phone conversa-

tion with the editor directly referenced the theme of colonialism, after her blood

and national father dies, she questions the legacy of colonial oppression and

Eurocentrism, as well as how US ethnic, racial and sexual cultural and political

discourses affect the lives of Puerto Ricans and other minority groups. Is a Black

US-born and raised Puerto Rican an African American or a Puerto Rican? Are

Nuyoricans real Puerto Ricans or are they Americans? Should gays and lesbians

in Puerto Rico translate elements of the US gay and lesbian political movement?

These are some of the issues that Claudia considers while deciding whether she

should attend her father’s funeral.

Through Claudia’s photographic and documentary work, her voice-overs, her

conversations with friends, the inclusion of historical/official documentary

footage, and her memories and nightmares, these distinct themes progressively

merge. However, this thematic amalgamation does not represent a cohesive

ideological resolution, rather it destabilizes, complicates and expands the ‘‘us’’

(marginal sexual and racial identities in Puerto Rico and the United States)

within the ‘‘we’’ (Puerto Ricans, Americans, African Americans, gays and

lesbians). Consequently, even though the third phone call pushes Claudia to

consider the past, to analyze her exilic present and to envision a diasporic and

ethnic future, her passage from one ‘‘place’’ to ‘‘another’’ maps numerous sites in

which Other Puerto Ricans see themselves and are seen by others.

Without knowing ‘‘how to feel’’ and ‘‘how to make sense of reality’’ because

of her father’s death, Claudia decides to visit the past. Still, this past does not

relate to her upbringing in Puerto Rico but instead functions as a historical

reconstruction of the late 1940s and 1950s Puerto Rican migrations to the

United States and the 1960s and 1970s radical political mobilizations of US

Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York City. More significant,

Claudia’s source of information and knowledge about the Puerto Rican

diaspora come from interviewing the African American writer Toni Cade

Bambara. As indicated by Negron-Muntaner (1999a), in Brincando el charco

the ‘‘authorized voice of history is that of an African American woman, the late

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writer Toni Cade Bambara, whose narrative of encounter with Puerto Ricans in

Harlem makes clear that the other can tell your story without destroying the

possibility of alternative versions’’ (517). In addition to recreating a unique

historical narrative of the Puerto Rican diaspora, the filmic presence of

Bambara, together with black and white documentary footage of the 1940s and

1950s Puerto Rican migration and the African American and Puerto Rican

political coalitions in New York City, recovers the alliances created by these two

ethnic groups and interrogates these communities’ fragmented present.

In an attempt to understand the racial and ethnic uncertainness of her new

home (the United States) and to detach herself from the legacy of her racist

homeland/father, Claudia reinterprets the positionality of Black Puerto Ricans

in both the United States and Puerto Rico. The inclusion of Toni Cade Bambara

is intertwined with two other individuals/characters: a Black Nuyorican

woman/poet and a Black born and raised Puerto Rican woman who resides

in the United States. Through these women Claudia reassesses the post 1960s

US ethnic paradigm that ‘‘does not consider national origin, religion, language,

or cultural differences among blacks’’, and assumes that ‘‘all [blacks] look alike’’

(Omi and Winant, 1994, 22), as she also reconsiders Puerto Rico’s margin-

alization of Blacks from the nation/family.

In a performance piece (in which Claudia is seen as an audience member), the

mainland Puerto Rican (Nuyorican) poet explains that her blackness makes her

‘‘indistinguishable from other African Americans’’ even though she considers

herself Puerto Rican. In a documentary-style interview and in ‘‘a day in school’’

sequence, the Black woman from Puerto Rico confesses to Claudia/the audience

that in the United States, it has been primarily African Americans who have

questioned her identity even though she also sees herself as ‘‘a sister.’’ Yet,

Puerto Ricans have also doubted her ethnic authenticity based on the hegemonic

exclusion of Blacks from the Puerto Rican national imaginary. If in the US

Claudia had to play the role of a Latina activist based on her ethnicity, these

two women’s black bodies typecast them as African Americans.

The Black women’s voices and identity places and placings present the third

marginal ‘‘us’’ that is part of the ‘‘we’’ in Brincando el charco. While the first

‘‘us’’ in the ‘‘we’’ intersects and questions family/nation, sexuality and US gay

politics, and the second ‘‘us’’ addresses Puerto Rico as a translocal US-island

nation, the third ‘‘us’’ illustrates how historical, social and cultural construc-

tions of blackness, African Americanness and Puerto Ricanness inform the

inclusion/exclusion of black bodies/citizens in particular communities. Through

Claudia’s encounters with these Black women, she begins to examine her racial

privilege in Puerto Rico and the United States. Claudia’s light skin protected her

from suffering the ongoing discrimination endured by Black Puerto Ricans on

the island. Her light skin also allows her to pass as White in the United States as

long as her ethnic accent remains unheard. Read as White in Puerto Rico and

heard/re-read as an accented woman of color in the United States, Claudia



decides to reposition herself as part of the African and Puerto Rican diasporas

(‘‘I am a surface where mestizo diasporas display one of their many faces’’).

The Puerto Rican (and Latin American) racial and cultural discourse of

mestizaje, which promotes a racially equal and culturally hybrid space while

establishing a hierarchical structure for Black, mestizo/mulatto and White

citizens/cultures, is transformed by Claudia. For Claudia (similar to Gloria

Anzaldua’s (1987) reinterpretation of Chicano culture and literature), the

mestizo diaspora signifies border crossings and a new political, racial, ethnic

and Afro-diasporic consciousness. The United States as a ‘‘contact zone’’

historically marked by subjugation, racism, violence and racial and cultural

differences becomes a place for collaborations among racially and sexually

oppressed groups (Pratt, 1992). Claudia creates a ‘‘thirdspace’’ that transcends

binary and/or externally imposed identity labeling (Naficy, 2001, 220).

Politically, culturally and socially aware of multiple possibilities within the

thirdspace, Claudia reinvents the United States. The images of winter that

marked her ‘‘anonymous and detached’’ exilic self are turned into sunny days

and peoples occupying the streets and buildings that she first envisioned as gray,

cold and empty. Diasporic Puerto Ricans, gays and lesbians of color and African

Americans cohabit this thirdspace with Claudia. She builds a new home where

memories of oppression, struggles and alliances become the structural and

communal foundation for her US familial relations. Sure about where she sees

herself in the ‘‘present,’’ Claudia makes the decision to go to her father’s funeral.

Also, more at ease within the thirdspace, Claudia revisits her memories of

her gay life in Puerto Rico, openly/visually expresses her sexual desires for

women and considers the influences of the US gay and lesbian movement in

Puerto Rico.

One of the most controversial aspects of Brincando el charco relates to what

Negron-Muntaner (1999a) refers to as the ‘‘kissing girls sequence’’ (522).

Whereas the killing of Puerto Rico’s national culture by an accented filmmaker,

lesbian and scholar who allegedly supports statehood for Puerto Rico has

barred (that is, black listed) Negron-Muntaner from island-based intellectual

circles (see Sandoval-Sanchez, 2007), the filmic inclusion of lesbian sexual

desires directly challenges Puerto Rico’s (Latin American and Latino/a)

patriarchal, heteronormal and blatantly homophobic cultures. Although in

Puerto Rico, public performances, the vernacular and mediated representations

of sexuality (touching, kissing, dressing styles, jokes with a sexual twist,

televisual images, popular songs and so on) are, as Negron-Muntaner (1999a)

writes, part of the ‘‘every day life and popular culture’’ (522), female sexual

agency is constrained by historically and socially constructed ideologies of

women as mothers or sacred virgins. Thus, by including the kissing girls

sequence and by alluding to Claudia and Ana’s active sexual life (‘‘what about

getting me encinta [pregnant]?’’), the explicit and implicit scenes transgress

hegemonic norms of female (heterosexual/passive) sexual performance and,

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more importantly, the invisibility and ‘‘presumption of lesbian asexuality’’

(Straayer, 1996, 213).

Through these scenes, the ‘‘body with multiple points of contacts’’ becomes

a multiplicity of corporeal, sensual and sexual female bodies who perform acts

of ‘‘forbidden’’ desires. The narrative invites the viewers (especially female

spectators) to engage in their pleasures through both voyeurism and action

(‘‘don’t look/do it’’). Furthermore, in the scene in which Claudia and Ana

‘‘announce’’ that they will try to get each other encinta, Negron-Muntaner

presents Puerto Rican/Latina lesbians in charge of their sexual desires and free

from the Catholic, heteronormal and repressive culture of guilt and shame.

While Negron-Muntaner (1999a) characterizes the ‘‘kissing girl sequence’’ as

‘‘a tango of possibilities for lesbian spectatorship’’ and as a ‘‘tease’’ (522), these

scenes address the fourth marginalized ‘‘us’’ in the ‘‘we’’ – female and lesbian

sexuality, bodily desires and pleasures that are either absent, closeted and/or

deemed as sinful in the context of Puerto Rican (island and diaspora) cultures.

In this socio-cultural milieu, the images and text function as a visual and

verbal ‘‘outing’’ of lesbian sexuality, as well as a queering of the Puerto Rican

island-diasporic family.2 As Sandoval-Sanchez (2007) notes, Brincando el

charco is ‘‘a foundational text that gives visibility for the first time to lesbians

and gays in Puerto Rico [ y ] los patos y las patas [Puerto Rican queers] gain

agency for the articulation and examination of their own relationships with the

father, the family, the home, the nation, the burial place, and even with

the myth of the eternal return’’ (160). Along with acquiring political agency, the

kissing girl sequence and the ‘‘getting me encinta’’ scene illustrate not only that

Puerto Rican lesbians ‘‘exist’’ but that they, as Marilyn Frye (1998) writes, are

‘‘doing it’’ (Frye, quoted in Straayer, 1996, 200).

The theme of lesbian sexual desires is placed side by side with gay and lesbian

political activism. Through a video and a letter written by Claudia’s ex-lover

(Maritza), Claudia learns about the first gay parade in Puerto Rico, which

was organized by a ‘‘veteran from Stonewall.’’ Maritza’s letter, voice and video

illustrate another reality of Claudia’s black and white memory of her traumatic

past. Those who decided to stay and live under the oppressive homophobic

national father have developed communal sites for empowerment. By trans-

lating and adapting political strategies associated with the US gay and lesbian

movement, gays and lesbians in Puerto Rico have established their public and

political presence. Other gay activists, (as illustrated in a documentary/interview

sequence), in order to get HIV treatment, have migrated to New York City

and have thus inaugurated an/Other air/airplane survival bridge from Puerto

Rico to New York.

Although throughout the film Claudia constantly ponders US colonialism

while at the same time resisting binary and simplistic colonial and colonized

constructions, the translation and appropriation of the US gay and lesbian

movement in Puerto Rico and the ACT-UP NYC-PR hints at the possibilities

2 I am borrowing

this from Straayer’s

(1996) analysis on

gay and lesbian

independent films

and videos that

problematize issues

of race, gender,

class and culture.



of gay liberation, even though these promises are framed through the intricacies

of colonial discourse. As Jose Quiroga (2000) notes, in Negron-Muntaner’s

project, there is a constant attempt ‘‘to rescue the liberatory potential’’ of

multiple and ambiguous political, social, cultural and historical relations (194).

Negron-Muntaner does not provide answers, rather she re-introduces and

complicates canonical historical narratives and island-based diaspora intellec-

tual debates. As part of this rewriting, she transforms discourses of Puerto

Ricanness and of the Puerto Rican migrations (the push and pull economic

factors) foregrounding the fact that ‘‘Others,’’ while absent in history and

academic books, have moved to the United States in order to – literally – be

alive.

The themes of having a life and being able to reside in a culturally and

ethnically welcoming place occupy the last minutes of Brincando el charco.

Claudia’s unavoidable return to the homeland has heightened her anxiety.

As evident in a nightmare sequence and in her ongoing avoidance of the subject,

it is clear that Claudia does not want to go back. Still, despite the fact that for

Claudia Puerto Rico is a ‘‘nightmare,’’ she is overcome by a feeling of nostalgia

(associated with land and nature). Claudia knows that some island-based Puerto

Ricans, for instance one of her New York City friends, want to go back to the

island to be with ‘‘their own’’ and ‘‘in their own land’’ even though Puerto Rico

is not sovereign. Claudia is also aware that others (as shown in the last

documentary/interview scene) have gone back to the island and then returned to

the United States for personal and/or professional reasons. Even though Claudia

feels at home in her US ‘‘thirdspace,’’ she is ‘‘pulled in both directions.’’ Thus,

will Claudia return to the United States or will she stay in Puerto Rico? Is she

going to be able to distance herself totally from her homeland and her ‘‘blood’’

and island-based ethnic family? Will she be capable of negotiating between her

multiple ‘‘points of contact’’ and the US hegemonic fixated identities and

categorizations? At the end of the film, Claudia’s future is still in the air. The last

shot presents Claudia’s airplane taking off, and then the image is frozen. The

open-ended narrative and, consequently, Claudia’s unfinished journey symbo-

lically illustrate that ‘‘neither home-seeking journeys nor the homecoming

journey is fully meliorating’’ (Naficy, 2001, 237).

Although Negron-Muntaner (1999a, 525) (the scholar) has openly estab-

lished that she is a ‘‘purely perfect Puerto Rican right here’’ (in the United

States), Claudia presents multiple uncertainties regarding the relationship

with the ‘‘self,’’ homeland and the host country. Through Claudia’s body,

Negron-Muntaner mediates some of her selves, as well as exposes some of

the dilemmas that she, as a filmmaker, has stumbled upon.3 Additionally, via

Claudia, Negron-Muntaner began to be represented as the unworthy Puerto

Rican in island-based and some diasporic academic circles.4

Generally speaking, Negron-Muntaner’s unworthiness is related to some

intellectuals’ readings of Claudia as autobiographical and as a result, as

3 For instance, after

the release of her

documentary AIDS

in the Barrio some

critics denounced

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Negron-Muntaner’s dismissal of the island and the island-based population.

Furthermore, and as I previously observed, the killing of the national culture,

which since the 1930s has functioned as a strategy to maintain the illusion of

racial equality and unity while concomitantly operating as a symbolic shield

against US political, cultural and economic interventions, may also account for

Negron-Muntaner’s unworthy status. Another point of criticism of both the film

and Negron-Muntaner is associated with what some scholars and island-based

journalists have interpreted as a binary construction of Puerto Rico and the

United States. For example, according to Blasini (1996), Brincando el charco

‘‘vilifies Puerto Rico at the expense of glorifying US society – for the freedom

and anonymity it provides, among other things – without pointing out how the

sexism and homophobia experienced by Puerto Ricans in the United States is

also marked by racial and ethnic bigotry’’ (4). Finally, and intertwined with the

binary representation of Puerto Rico and the United States, is the issue of

culture. In the last documentary/interview segment, a participant indicates that

she suffered ‘‘a cultural thirstiness’’ when she returned to the island. Hence,

what is the signification of culture for this participant? What specifically caused

her ‘‘cultural dryness’’? On the other hand, what undisclosed elements make the

entire US culturally rich? These are some of the thematically unresolved and

highly puzzling elements that frame the ending of Brincando el charco.

In Negron-Muntaner’s (1999b) article ‘‘Beyond the Cinema of the Other or

toward Another Cinema,’’ she explains her motivations behind Brincando el

charco.

Without doubt, I wanted Brincando el charco to provoke some type of

polemic. At the same time, however, that the film invites the spectator to

a dialogue, it also fears it. In the last instance, I expected the film to answer

the question of whether it is possible to return home, or at least, to return

to some houses in common. (153)

More than answering questions about identities, the United States and Puerto

Rico, the relevance of Brincando el charco comes through the actual posing of

multiple queries and the opening of various dialogic spaces for themes that have

been excluded in both the island and the mainland public spheres. Furthermore,

the film itself is not ‘‘fearful of its consequences’’, rather Negron-Muntaner – the

accented filmmaker – is apprehensive about some spectators’ reactions. The fact

that Negron-Muntaner has written two academic articles explaining her

relation to the film and the meanings behind her selection of certain themes

and participants underscores the accented filmmaker’s dilemmas and negotia-

tions between personal motivations and artistic freedom and the pressures

arising from particular interpretative communities (Naficy, 2001, 80).

Despite personal attacks at conferences and screenings of Brincando el

charco, Negron-Muntaner continued to focus on the topic of Puerto Rico.

the film for its

absence of gay

voices, the unequal

power relations

between

participants and

media producers,

and the seeming

proliferation of

stereotypical

representations.

From 1989 to

1993, and

probably as a

response to these

critiques, Negron-

Muntaner

experimented with

a participatory

approach to

documentary

filmmaking.

4 In using the term

‘‘unworthy,’’ I am

influenced by Eve

Oishi’s (2000)

conceptualization

of ‘‘bad Asians,’’

which she defines

as Asian American

Queer filmmakers

who through their

films/videos

confront the US

hegemonic

construction of

Asians as a passive,

asexual, silent and

content ‘‘model

minority.’’



However, contrary to Brincando el charco, which rejects a resolution regarding

Puerto Rican identities, communities and migratory experiences, in Puerto

Rican ID (a 5-minute video that aired on PBS’ Signal to Noise: TV Inside

Out) Negron-Muntaner openly affirms that she is ‘‘at home with American

culture.’’ Through Puerto Rican ID, the filmic Negron-Muntaner character

directly challenges public and academic discourses of Puerto Ricanness in which

nationalism and familial/ethnic inclusion and acceptance have functioned

through ongoing rejections of the US presence, influences, politics and cultures.

Negotiating the Self through Televis ion

Puerto Rican ID centers on Negron-Muntaner’s childhood in 1970s Puerto

Rico and her ‘‘present’’ life in the United States. These temporal and geo-

graphical spaces are intertwined through Negron-Muntaner’s particular

childhood consumption of and fascination with US commercial television.

In Puerto Rican ID, TV’s cultural, racial and class images symbolize what

Negron-Muntaner thought she was, as well as what she did not want to be.

The video begins with Negron-Muntaner’s voice over describing her

privileged middle-class upbringing in a ‘‘modernized’’ neighborhood in San

Juan, Puerto Rico. Juxtaposing 1970s home movie images of herself and her

surroundings with 1940s–1950s newsreel footage of Puerto Rico’s economic

modernization and of the massive Puerto Rican migration to the United States

that took place in these decades, the narrative discloses the geo-political and

socio-economic spaces that partially inform her past. Nonetheless, in this past

Negron-Muntaner was totally unaware of Puerto Rico’s class stratification and

political-colonial complexities. Her comfortable and protected world revolved

around US television. ‘‘In dubbed Spanish, American TV spoke to me,’’ she

reveals, symbolically distancing herself from her home and homeland. Instead of

consuming locally produced telenovelas (which she categorizes as sentimental)

or comedies (which she classifies as representing ‘‘vulgar working-class

humor’’), Negron-Muntaner identified with the Whiteness and middle-class

ideology ingrained in shows such as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. It is not

until Negron-Muntaner migrates to the United States that she discovers her

remoteness from the Hollywood-made television images.

In the United States, Negron-Muntaner forms a different relationship with

US commercial television. By weaving her previous television experiences with

past and present portrayals of Puerto Ricans in mainstream television programs,

the news and films, Negron-Muntaner questions media constructions of her

compatriots. In her new home (the mainland), she, as a Puerto Rican, is

synonymous with ‘‘crime, drugs, poverty, and prostitution.’’ As a result of her

immigrant and newly acquired Otherness, Negron-Muntaner decides to

reconnect with her past (‘‘I turned the TV off for images I have not seen and

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did not know that existed’’). Yet, similar to Brincando el charco’s Claudia, for

Negron-Muntaner her ‘‘journeys of identity’’ do not relate to her previous home/

homeland per se; instead, her cultural, class and identity negotiations come

through her encounters with members of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Whereas in

Brincando el Charco the diaspora is already part of Claudia’s family/home

(through her lover Ana), in Puerto Rican ID the cinematically performed

Negron-Muntaner looks for the Nuyorican voice and presence.

Through interviews with two first-generation US Puerto Ricans who were

involved in the civil rights movement and by presenting news footage of 1960s–

1970s protests held in New York City, the narrative shifts from Negron-

Muntaner’s individual exilic presence to a communal-ethnic experience. Her

1970s middle-class US television-centered childhood, which erased economic-

stratifications, migrations and the struggles endured by Puerto Ricans in the

diaspora, is revisited and transformed by incorporating some of the ‘‘voices’’

that her individual, collective and historical past had silenced. While she was

consuming I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, Puerto Ricans and African

Americans (among other racialized groups) in New York City were marching,

protesting and cinematically documenting their civil rights struggles.

The inclusion of the Puerto Rican diaspora alters Negron-Muntaner’s exilic

past into an ethnic present and future. As the voice-over allegorically conveys,

‘‘American TV ignored who I was [ y ] but it informed where I was going to be

– at home with American culture.’’ Negron-Muntaner’s exile condition and new

political, collective, ethnic identity ‘‘rebuilt’’ and actually relocated what she

once considered a fixed, territorial, island-based home. As in Brincando el

charco, in Puerto Rican ID Negron-Muntaner places her home in the host

country – the United States. However, whereas in Brincando el charco Claudia

creates a thirdspace, a home inhabited by gays and lesbians, African Americans

and Nuyoricans, in Puerto Rican ID she repositions herself exclusively as part

of the Puerto Rican diaspora-ethnic collective identity. Additionally, while

Claudia rejects any involvement with Latino politics, the Negron-Muntaner

character in Puerto Rican ID embraces an ethnic political agenda by criticizing

Puerto Rican representations in US mainstream media. This said, even though

Puerto Rican ID is critical of mainstream media depictions of Puerto Ricans and

even though it presents the voices of the diaspora, the narrative’s US-centric

television ‘‘past’’ and ‘‘future’’ excludes and disempowers Puerto Rican and

Latin American media cultures and audiences.

An ideologically problematic aspect of Puerto Rican ID relates to Negron-

Muntaner’s comparison of Puerto Rico’s locally produced programming and US

television shows. Certainly, by disclosing her childhood consumption of US

commercial television, Negron-Muntaner indirectly addresses the intricacies and

ambiguities of colonial subjectivity. Nevertheless, given that she never returns and

examines her rejection of the allegedly corny telenovelas or her description of local

comedies as portraying ‘‘working-class humor,’’ Negron-Muntaner not only rejects



stereotypical images of Puerto Ricans depicted in US mainstream media, but also

Puerto Rican and Latin American televisual mediations of la cultura popular.

One important aspect to consider regarding Puerto Rican ID’s rather

narrow and elitist construction of Puerto Rican television relates to the fact

that the piece was commissioned by the producers of Signal to Noise, and that

Negron-Muntaner did not have any control over the final product. Although

Negron-Muntaner originally created a 20-minute piece, the final editing was in

the hands of the show’s producers who transformed it into a 5-minute video.

Thus, it is possible that the ‘‘original’’ Puerto Rican ID had a different depiction

of Puerto Rican televisual products.

In addition to these possibilities that may have (or may not have) represented

a less problematic ideological portrayal of the island television, what is

revealing about Puerto Rican ID is the ways in which Negron-Muntaner utilizes

television as a vehicle to express her Puerto Rican-US identity. In other words,

while the majority of Puerto Ricans on the island consumed locally produced

programs (which dominated prime-time television during the 1970s), Negron-

Muntaner tuned in solely to US shows (which in the 1970s were used to fill-out

television schedules). This cultural connection not only brings to the forefront

her distancing from Puerto Rican and Latin American popular and vernacular

cultures and the television landscape, but, more importantly, her ideological/

cultural identification with the United States. However, this identification does

not translate to an embracement of the US mainstream but instead signifies a

repositioning of herself as part of mainland Puerto Rican communities.

Negron-Muntaner’s rejection of the US hegemonic culture, her cinematic self-

inscription and her ethnic, political and cultural commitment to the Puerto

Rican diaspora are also part of her next project, Homeless Diaries. With this

1996 video, Negron-Muntaner returned to documentary filmmaking. While her

first documentary AIDS in the Barrio revolves around perceptions of AIDS, the

issue of machismo and homophobia, and the problem of drug trafficking and

addiction by some members of a Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia,

Homeless Diaries centers on the lack of housing and state support for

economically impoverished people. With this film, the accented filmmaker

explores the repercussions of the 1940s–1950s massive migration and the

unequal educational, financial and social opportunities for some first- and

second-generation mainland Puerto Ricans. While I do not have the space here

to embark on a close analysis of Homeless Diaries, I want to devote the last

paragraphs to the general themes presented in this work.

Fighting for an Actual Home/Creating Multiple Symbolic Homes

Homeless Diaries (a 50-minute video produced, directed and written by

Negron-Muntaner) captures the emergence of Tent City, a camp created in

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1995 by homeless individuals and community activists on an empty lot in

Philadelphia. Utilizing a video diary (from July 1995 to June 1996), personal

interviews and an analysis of media coverage, the documentary presents the

survival tactics and political struggles of the homeless living in Tent City.

In Homeless Diaries, Negron-Muntaner is primarily concerned with the US

mainstream’s forgetfulness and/or inability to comprehend that the American

dream and the pulling-oneself-up-by-the bootstraps ideology are historical/

rhetorical constructs. Although the main objective of Homeless Diaries is to

recount the struggles of a group of squatters in Philadelphia and to analyze the

perceptions of homelessness by middle-upper class (mostly White) individuals

and the homeless themselves, the documentary also questions the power of

media imagery and the significations of being literally and culturally

dispossessed. Similar to her previous accented work, Negron-Muntaner – once

again – destabilizes the meaning of home.

In Homeless Diaries, video cameras and the people who control the cameras/

images are employed to problematize media representations of subaltern

groups. Throughout the documentary, we see Negron-Muntaner and several

television news crews competing to get the homeless images and voices.

However, the fact that one news cameraman orders Negron-Muntaner to turn

off her video equipment illustrates that, in comparison to the mainstream

media, the accented filmmaker has no power. Thus, who controls the images of

marginal groups, for what purpose, and who benefits from those depictions?

These are some of the queries this documentary brings to the forefront. Still,

despite the mainstream and alternative media hierarchical differences, there are

broad economic and cultural disparities between Negron-Muntaner and her

documentary participants, a factor that she acknowledges in the first few

minutes of Homeless Diaries. Negron-Muntaner’s economic solvency has

provided her with the privilege of living in upscale neighborhoods in Puerto

Rico and in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, regardless of her residence in a nice

Philadelphia area ‘‘up the hill,’’ her ‘‘neighborhood of choice may never feel like

home.’’ In Homeless Diaries, home is thus a basic human right and a solid and

tangible structure, but it is also an indefinable feeling of belonging.

The 1970s home movie footage utilized in Puerto Rican ID to address

Negron-Muntaner’s middle-class upbringing and her fascination with US

television are included and transformed in Homeless Diaries. Her voice over

accompanies these images producing a sentiment of anoranza [yearning].

‘‘When I think of home, I see images of my neighborhood around 1976. Times

when I did not think of home, because I had one. Has migration been so costly

that it makes me pay in the currency of memory?’’ For the Negron-Muntaner

character in Homeless Diaries, thinking of home transports her to her 1970s

childhood in Puerto Rico.

Homeless Diaries is another journey of identity for Negron-Muntaner. The

Negron-Muntaner in Homeless Diaries brings a different perspective and



persona from the somewhat politically aloof Claudia in Brincando el charco and

the diasporic-ethnic Negron-Muntaner in Puerto Rican ID. Still, this

documentary interconnects the fragmented personae/characters present in her

previous accented films. In Homeless Diaries, one sees a continuation of the

‘‘marriage’’ of Ana and Claudia (that is, Negron-Muntaner’s symbolic

expansion of the Puerto Rican nation in Brincando el charco) and Negron-

Muntaner’s involvement with the Puerto Rican diaspora (Puerto Rican ID).

With Homeless Diaries, Negron-Muntaner returns and actually expands ‘‘the

houses in common’’ that, according to her, Brincando el charco allegorically

conveys but that are actually present in her subsequent accented work. Either

by being expelled from the home/homeland by a blood and national father and

by creating an inclusive thirdspace (Brincando el charco), by being culturally

disconnected from the territorial place of birth but politically linked to the

Puerto Rican diaspora (Puerto Rican ID) or by being engaged with a population

drastically different from her (Homeless Diaries), all of Negron-Muntaner’s

accented films articulate multiple meanings of home, family, homelessness,

belonging, commonality, community and self.

Through her accented cinema, Negron-Muntaner contests and complicates

historical, cultural, political and social discourses of Puerto Rican authenticity

in relation to the nation and the colonial power (the United States).

Furthermore, as Lourdes Torres (2007) observes regarding Negron-Muntaner’s

Brincando el charco (in addition to other ‘‘Boricua lesbian narratives’’), Puerto

Rican lesbians ‘‘are writing themselves’’ into the diasporic and island-based

narrative history, ‘‘a space that is primarily occupied by discourse marked as

white, male, and heterosexual’’ (234–235). Consciously or unconsciously,

Negron-Muntaner’s films are actually counterbalancing what anthropologist

Sherry B. Ortner (1995) refers to as ‘‘ethnographic refusal,’’ that is, scholars’

exclusive focus on the relationship between the subaltern and the powerful

without considering intragroup politics and conflicts. Utilizing hers and Others’

experiences, Negron-Muntaner’s accented films problematize the imposition

of singularized identities both in Puerto Rico and the United States, as well as

the internal and external politics among ethnic, racial, gendered and sexual

groups. Additionally, in her most recent and forthcoming documentaries (For

the Record: Guam and World War II, 2007; Regarding Vieques, in-progress),

Negron-Muntaner seems to continue down the path of using her films as

personal-cinematic elucidations of history and historical silences.

I want to end this article by noting that Negron-Muntaner’s cinematic

journeys have entered the inescapable realm of silences. As the analysis

presented here has tried to demonstrate, through her narratives, thematic inclu-

sions have operated through thematic omissions. After all, as Michel-Rolph

Trouillot (1995) writes regarding the production of history, ‘‘there is no perfect

closure to one event, however one chooses to define the boundaries of that

event’’ (49). Despite silences and omissions, Negron-Muntaner’s films have

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created diverse interpretations of the complexities of exilic, diasporic and ethnic

individuals and communities who have been looking for either a literal or

a symbolic familial place where they could feel more or less at home.

About the Author

Yeidy M. Rivero is Associate Professor in the Departments of American Culture

and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of

Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican

Television (Duke University Press, 2005). She is currently at work on a history

of Cuban commercial television (1950–1960) paying particular attention to

issues of modernity, nationhood, identity and transnational media flows.

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Diasporic and marginal crossroads: The films of Frances Negrón-Muntaner

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