SA (a new MMW contributor!)
I’ll admit it, Iwent to see a PG rated movie the other day, “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”, but for some reason I felt like seeing it, I think mostly because one of the stars is America Ferrera, the girl who played the main character in “Real Women Have Curves”, which I loved. She plays Carmen, and her storyline in the movie revolves around a summer spent with her estranged father whom she hasn’t seen in years. Her mother’s Puerto Rican and her father is white, and has remarried into what Carmen later dubs “Attack of the Blondes”. She feels not only personally rejected by her father, but that he has rejected her culture and that her new stepfamily is completely oblivious that she is in fact different from them, completely ignoring her culture and expecting her to assimilate, which in turn only makes her feel invisible in her father’s home. I thought it was great that a mainstream movie explored mixed race identity in a thoughtful way- yes, you could call this another variation on the tragic mixed child theme, but it also doesn’t look away and pretend being mixed is not worth exploring.