"Latino," 1985

Had you heard of, or seen, the movie Latino, from 1985? I hadn’t. Until this week. It’s set in Nicaragua in 1983, during the U.S.-backed war in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas. The movie is about a Mexican American green beret from Los Angeles who falls in love with a Nicaraguan woman, and experiences all of the dilemmas of being a Latino soldier fighting for the U.S. military in Central America. There are other movies about U.S. military interventions in Central America and the resulting movement of refugees to the United States. I’m thinking of a film like El Norte. But Latino is the one I’ll assign in my classes on Latino history.

Let me tell you how I came across Latino.

I watched Grease with my family over the holidays. Maybe you remember the scene at the Rydell High dance off, where the tension and chemistry between Danny Zuko (John Travolta) and Charlene “Cha Cha” DiGregorio (Annette Charles) is palpable. You know that Danny was in love with Sandy (Olivia Newton John), but he was momentarily pulled back into his relationship with Cha Cha because they just had to win that dance competition. The last time I saw Grease was probably a decade or two ago. Maybe more. I hadn’t remembered this plot line about Zuko’s past with an “ethnic” woman. Was she Latina? Italian? Cha Cha suggested Latina, DiGregorio suggested Italian. I wanted to know more about her.

I still don’t know where her last name, Charles, came from. But she was born Annette Cardona, and, according to her Wikipedia page, she was Mexican and Italian (she died in 2011 at the age of 63). Her parents were Emanuel and Mary Cardona. Maybe her mom’s maiden name was Charles, though that doesn’t sound particularly Italian, does it? She married three times, so I suspect Charles was a name she took from a husband. Yes, I could confirm this with more research, but figuring out the origins of her name isn’t my concern. The main point is that my curiosity about her led me to discover that she’d co-starred in Latino. And interestingly, in the credits for Latino, she’s named as Maria Cardona. She was also a TV actress who appeared in Bonanza, The Incredible Hulk, and Magnum P.I. Someone should write about her. I’d like to know more.

But back to Latino.

So far as I can tell, the title Latino comes from “Latino Battalion,” the apparently fictitious name of a group of Latino soldiers fighting against Sandinistas in Nicaragua. (Does anyone know if there was actually a “Latino Battalion”? I knew that Latinos fought in Central America, but I hadn’t heard of a particular battalion made up of Latinos).

If you hope to gain some deeper understanding of what “Latino” means, because, based on the movie’s title, you expect some meditation on the term itself, you’ll be disappointed.

But that doesn’t mean the movie offers no insights into the dilemmas of latinidad: how Latinos from the United States confront and participate in U.S. militarism in Latin America and against Latin Americans; how the U.S. military uses Latinos in Latin America as both cultural brokers (they speak Spanish with the locals) and as cannon fodder (the lead character, Eddie Guerrero, played by Robert Beltran, says to another member of the Latino battalion, “we’re the [n-word] of this war”); the complexities of Latino identity forged somewhere in the connections and spaces between the United States and Latin America.

A white colonel based in Honduras, on the border with Nicaragua, tells Guerrero/Beltran that he has all the respect in the world for “our Hispanics,” meaning those who fight against the Sandinistas. Guerrero is responsible for recruiting and training Nicaraguans to fight with them, and while there’s some cultural understanding between them, it becomes clear that they inhabit very different social and political worlds. Guerrero also has plans to bring Marlena back with him to Los Angeles, where, he tells her, they can live a “good life.” But it dawns on both of them, because of the political situation, because Guerrero is killing her people, that it’ll never work out.

In the final scene, Guerrero has surrendered and is being driven out of the town of El Porvenir on a truck, held at gunpoint by Sandinistas. He is naked, with only his dog tags clenched in his hand. Marlena, who has abandoned her middle-class life to fight with the Sandistas, locks eyes with him as the truck rolls by. That’s when the credits start to roll, and the song “Voice of America,” by Little Steven, begins to play:

“Can you hear me, wake up
Where's the voice of America

Somebody help me, we gotta stop a crime
I been betrayed by my own kind
I been quiet, too quiet
While across the borderline
We die

Can you hear me, wake up
Where's the voice of America

I know that we knew right from wrong once upon a time
Everything we stood for has been compromised
I been quiet, too quiet
While across our borderline
My people lie

Can you hear me, wake up
Where's the voice of America

You're quiet, too quiet, are you still alive
Inside

Can you hear me, wake up
We're the voice of America
We're the voice of America
We're the voice of America
We're the voice of America”

Eddie, and maybe Marlena, lament what might have been between them. Eddie realizes he was fighting on the wrong side—not necessarily that he would have fought with the Sandinistas, but that he had caused harm by fighting for the United States. I wouldn’t call this a great movie. Some of the acting was downright bad. But it’s certainly interesting, worth a watch, and excellent to teach with.