Rosa Linda Fregoso’s The Bronze Screen is a brilliant addition to the growing body of new knowledge on Chicana and Chicano cultural production. With a fine eye for visual nuance and a quick and subtle take on the complexities of contemporary culture, Fregoso offers us the first truly comprehensive theoretical assessment of the new visual technologies to which Chicana/o artists are now turning. Admirably well researched and written in a refreshingly clear style, this book will certainly be required reading in my courses on Cultural Studies.

Rosa Linda Fregoso’s The Bronze Screen opens the way for international debate on the new critical field of Chicano/a cinema. Fregoso provides an incisive articulation of the ways in which narrative codes in film can telescope complex versions of Mexican and American culture and history. The often violent impact of ‘first’ (U.S.) and ‘third’ (Mexico) world cultures and geographies is channeled through the very term Chicano/a as well as its cinematic representation. Fregoso’s masterful critique brings out with great clarity the irony, paradox, and contradictions of such historical collisions.

Makes a significant and needed contribution to cinema studies, to Chicano studies, and to cultural studies.

This is state-of-the-art scholarship. Rosa Linda Fregoso has managed to combine social histories, textual analyses, and film theories into an original and useful view of contemporary Chicano cinema. The Bronze Screen proves that gender and race need not be mutually exclusive-and that history and theory actually have something to say to each other, given the right writer to facilitate the conversation.

The author analyzes Chicano films, including La Bamba (1987) and American Me (1992), plus some earlier, less well known films. In a time of increasing awareness of diversity issues, her provocative, feminist-based anlysis of Chicano films and their messages, which often counter popular images of Chicano history and culture, is certainly welcome.

Coherent and focused. Fregoso has a sharp critical eye. Fregoso provides compelling analyses as she focuses on contexts and issues, particularly gender, often overlooked by other Chicano critics of popular culture and the media. This is a text that will challenge and provoke students interested in and knowledgeable about the Chicano Movement and Chicana/o film. It is also a useful illustration of how incorporating cultural and feminist analyses into issues of gender and ethnicity can enrich our understanding of Chicano culture. Fregoso provides insightful analyses that bridge from the masculine set of texts endemic to Chicano studies to a more encompassing vision that is inclusive of Chicanos in the context of Mexican-American popular culture.

The Bronze Screen presents a treatise on the power of cinema and the commercial screen to inscribe and re-inscribe Chicano/a identity and culture.