Arriago Delgado created the film from her own experiences, having lived in Alaska for twenty-plus years. There, she’s found and helped build a self-reflective Latino community that values its voice. “The film, it was written by me, but really, I just let people say whatever they wanted,” she says over Zoom, “And then I just went in, in the editorial process and carved out the path for the narrative.”
The result is a pretty fun film that had me laughing out loud—which doesn’t surprise Arriago Delgado. “I don’t think you can make a film about Latinos and not have humor… humor is part of our language,” she shares. But it’s not part of the narrative Hollywood spins about us—Latinos may feel most represented by comedy but we’re more like to be featured in crime stories.
There’s no crime, drugs, or cartels in either “Frida” or “Sabor Artico,” but that doesn’t mean the documentaries paint a rosy view of our communities or our place in the world. As Arriago Delgado asserts, “You can be proud of your culture, and you can celebrate your culture, but you can also at the same time acknowledge that things are really imperfect.”
With a nod to the importance of recognizing this same imperfection, Gutiérrez calls Frida Kahlo, perhaps the most famous Mexican woman in the world, “messy” and notes how she both resisted and played with stereotypes around her identity. “The gringos’ reactions to the way she looked, the fascination that they had with her, it’s like this exotic, sexy woman that was very colorful,” Gutiérrez explains of Kahlo’s reception in the US. “She was incredibly aware of it… Taking this reaction [to] the way that other people are seeing [her], and then using that as an armor and turning it around, and making it even more explosive. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna show you, I’m getting your attention so I’m gonna make my presence really performative and I’m gonna use it for power.”
That interaction between performance, expectations, and power seems to always be in play when Latinas make films these days, navigating how the powers that be see our communities and pushing against them (or not) to varying degrees. Kahlo distinguished herself as a once-in-a-generation artist thanks to her ability to make her interior experience visible. But is she perhaps so well known in part because she also conformed to if not reinforced ideas of Mexican women as fiery and sexually promiscuous? Perhaps.