Frederick Luis Aldama

Frederick Luis Aldama and graphic artists from Mapache Studios give shape to ugly truths in the most honest way, creating new perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about life in the borderlands of the Américas. Each bilingual prose-art fictional snapshot offers an unsentimentally complex glimpse into what it means to exist at the margins of society today.

This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those propagated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.

The foremost expert on Latinx comics, Frederick Luis Aldama guides us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheros in comics since the 1940s. Aldama takes us where the superheroes live—the barrios, the hospitals, the school rooms, the farm fields—and he not only shows us a view to the Latinx content, sometimes deeply embedded, but also provokes critical inquiry into the way storytelling formats distill and reconstruct real Latinos/as.

Experts in Latinx pop culture Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González explain the real implications of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film. They also provide a roadmap through a history of mediatized Latinxs that rupture stereotypes and reveal nuanced reconstructions of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.

This timeless volume is a significant analysis of the burgeoning field of Latinx filmmaking. Editor Frederick Luis Aldama has gathered together some of the best writing on Latinx ciné in the twenty-first century. Today’s filmmakers show the world a rich Latinidad informed by a complexly layered culture replete with history, biography, and everyday experiences.