Tag Archives: Edward James Olmos

Film, male filmmakers

Blood In Blood Out (1993)

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Taylor Hackford’s epic is usually labeled as a knockoff of Edward James Olmos’ classic film about the Mexican Mafia, American Me. But in spite of its many faults, Blood in Blood Out is a great movie in its own right. All Roger Ebert proved when he dismissed it as incoherent and nihilistic was that he couldn’t handle the real truth about American capitalism.

Blood in Blood Out opens in 1972. Miklo Velka, a blue-eyed Mexican American of half-Anglo descent, returns home to East LA after a brief stint in juvenile detention for assaulting his white father, a racist who hates Mexicans. Miklo is determined to prove that he’s at much of a “Vato Loco” as his two cousins, Paco Aguilar, a hot-headed ex-boxer played by Benjamin Bratt, and Jesse Borrego, a talented painter who has just won a scholarship to art-school. His opportunity comes when the Tres Puntos, a gang from a rival neighborhood, start tagging alleyways on Vato Loco turf. Velka smashes the rear window of their car. All three men make a clean getaway, and Velka gets his gang tattoos.

Of course it doesn’t stop there. In retaliation, the Tres Puntos kidnap Borrego, the most level-headed and non-violent of the three young men, and beat him so badly he almost dies. The Vatos Locos, in turn, stage a well-organized attack against the Tres Puntos. Velka, who kills “Spider,” the Tres Puntos leader, is sent to San Quentin. Aguilar, who drives the getaway car, is given the choice of either going to prison along with his cousin, or joining the United States Marines. He chooses the latter. Borrego, after a long recovery, becomes addicted to prescription painkillers, then heroin.

Blood In Blood Out’s San Quentin, and the movie was filmed on location at the real San Quentin, is dominated by three rival prison gangs, the Aryan Vanguard, the Black Guerrilla Army, and La Onda. Velka, being white, yet fluent in Spanish, is recruited both by the Aryan Vanguard, a loosely fictionalized Aryan Brotherhood, and La Onda, a loosely fictionalized Mexican Mafia. Being “young meat,” only 18-years old, and “pretty,” he needs to choose fast. Blood in Blood out deals as frankly with the issue of prison rape as American Me. Velka needs to join a crew, or become someone’s “punk.”

Montana Segura, the leader of La Onda, is a radical Chicano who reads Frantz Fanon in his cell, and wants an alliance of black and brown against white. Nevertheless, he agrees to let Velka, who has the right Chicano gang tattoos, in La Onda under one condition. Velka has to kill “Big Al,” the Aryan Vanguard member who runs gambling in San Quentin. “Blood in,” Segura informs him. The only way to get into La Onda is to carry out an assassination on a rival gang member. “Blood out,” he adds. Once you’re in, you’re in for life. Velka not only kills “Big Al.” He’s level-headed enough to find a notebook that “Big Al” keeps on people who owe him money. Since it contains proof of collusion between the Aryan Vanguard and at least one San Quentin prison guard, it also means increased leverage for La Onda, and an increased level of status for Miklo Velka. In only a few months, he’s gone from “punk” to trusted confident of Montana Segura.

Miklos Velka has, in fact, been so successful at San Quentin that when he’s finally paroled after 9 years, it’s a let down. He gets part of a room in a halfway house run by another ex-con, and a menial job in an auto-repair shop, where his boss skims money off employee paychecks to pay his own gambling debts. It’s only a matter of time before he winds up back inside. In the meantime, even though Jesse Borrego has become a successful artist, has not been able to shake his addiction to painkillers, and it takes a tragic turn when Paco Aguilar’s brother, who looks up to Borrego as a hero, finds heroin in Borrego’s apartment and overdoses. Aguilar, who has served honorably in the Marine Corps, and who is now a narcotics detective on the LAPD, pushes Borrego out of the family.

If there’s a weakness in Blood in Blood Out it’s the script’s lack of clarity about the LAPD and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. On one hand, Hackford seems to acknowledge that the corrections officers at San Quentin play blacks, whites and Hispanics off against one another as part of an overall effort to destroy the black, white, and Hispanic working classes. On the other hand, Paco Aguilar, played by the same Benjamin Bratt who would go on to the pro-NYPD propaganda show Law and Order is clearly a sympathetic character. The LAPD is never shown gratuitously harassing blacks or Hispanics. What’s more, Paco Aguilar’s time in the Marine Corp and on the LPAD freed him from the same destructive path Jesse Borrego and Miklo Velka would go down. Taylor Hackford, unlike Edward James Olmos never quite ties the moral destruction of his anti-hero to the prison industrial complex, although at times, it must be admitted, he comes close.

Tired of seeing his wages stolen from him by his corrupt boss, and sick of his degrading living situation, Miklo Velko agrees to participate in the robbery of an armored car. Someone tips off Paco and the LAPD. Velko is shot in the leg, which he eventually loses, and sent back to San Quentin. It’s now the 1980s. Montana Segura, still the head of La Onda. But the old time Chicano militant does not understand the importance of the cocaine trade. Velka does. Control the flow of cocaine, and you control San Quentin. Carlos, another La Onda member, tries to strike up an alliance with the Aryan Vanguard, but he’s killed by members of the Black Guerrilla Army. La Onda retaliates against a B.G.A. controlled night club back in Los Angeles. A general war between black and Hispanic gang members erupts, not only in San Quentin, but across the whole California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. For the Aryan Vanguard, it’s an opportunity. If they can keep the war going, they can come out on top, a classic example of “divide and conquer.” For Montana, it’s what he’s always feared, the end of his dreams of a radical, black and brown alliance, the final victory of white supremacy. Bonifide, the leader of the Black Guerrilla Army agrees. Together, they arrange a truce.

Earlier in the film, Miklo had protested to Montana that being a true Chicano wasn’t about skin color, but about your ideals. Segura had taken him at his word. In fact, Montana Segura so trusts his white Mexican protégé that he appoints him as the commander of La Onda at San Quentin after he’s allowed a brief transfer to another penitentiary, not only to help negotiate with the local leaders of the B.G.A. to maintain the truce, but to see his 11-year-old daughter. Montana Segura is a violent, brutal man, but he’s also an intelligent, sympathetic one, and the scene where he’s murdered by a B.G.A. member on the morning that he’s finally about to get a visit from his daughter is the most gut wrenching few minutes in the film. We feel the La Onda’s anger over the apparent betrayal, and want to take revenge against the B.G.A. along with Miklo and “Magic Mike,” another high-ranking La Onda lieutenant.

What happens next puts Miklo Velka on the level of Walter White as a symbol of radical evil, and I mention Walter White because the mass prison killing in the final season of Breaking Bad seems to have been inspired by the climax of Blood In Blood out. Bonifide convinces Miklo and Magic Mike that the B.G.A. had nothing to do with Montana Segura’s murder, that the Aryan Vanguard had forged the kill order. It all makes sense. Why would Bonfide have Segura killed when they had just arranged a truce? Why would he use a B.G.A. member and not an outsider? The alliance holds. The black and Hispanic prisoners in San Quentin massacre the leadership of the Aryan Vanguard. Segura’s dream seems to have come true. Not only have Miklo, Magic Mike, and Bonfide avenged his death. The black and Hispanic prisoners have taken over the cocaine trade across California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

But wait. As it turns out, skin color does matter. Miklo Velka was never a true Chicano. It wasn’t the Aryan Vanguard who ordered Montana Segura’s murder. It was Miklo Velka. The war between the Black Guerrilla Army and La Onda was never a war at all. It was a coup by an opportunistic white Mexican against an old left-wing Chicano militant.

Miklo Velka has not reverted back to his biological father’s racism against Mexicans. It’s much worse. He doesn’t care about race, but he certainly doesn’t care about the Chicano ideal. After he double crosses Bonifide and the leaders of the Black Guerrilla Army, it’s clear what he really does care about, power. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation breaks up the San Quentin Leadership of La Onda and scatters them across prisons in California and Texas. For Velka, it’s an opportunity. It means the expansion of La Onda’s prison empire. Montoya Santana, the hero of American Me, died for his honor, and the honor of the Mexican people. If Damian Chapa doesn’t quite have the same ability to embody evil as Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, the resolution of Blood In Blood Out seems strangely relevant in the age of Rachel Dolezal, social media, and identity politics. Miklo Velka, a white man, has used the memory of the Chicano movement, and the dream of a new Aztlán, not to liberate Mexican Americans, but to make himself dictator of his own little kingdom of hell.

Film, Male Film Directors

American Me (1992)

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Halfway through American Me, the Edward James Olmos biographical crime drama about Mexican Mafia founder Rodolfo Cadena, a middle-aged Mexican American man named Montoya Santana, Olmos himself, is out on a date with his girlfriend, Julie. Santana is handsome, masculine, decisive, yet he seems almost like a teenager. He doesn’t know how to buy clothes. He threatens a harried shoe store clerk for disrespecting him. He can’t drive. He’s never had sex with a girl. Julie, Evelina Fernández, feels almost maternal.

Montoya Santana is no ordinary 40-year-old virgin. He is founder of La Eme, the Mexican Mafia, one of the most powerful prison gangs on the west coast, recently paroled after spending decades behind bars for killing his rapist in juvenile detention. Santana has also fired the first shots in what will become a destructive gang war between Mexican and Italian organized criminals for control of the heroin trade in East Los Angeles. We flash to a parallel scene inside Folsom prison, where Santana still wields great power. Days before, he had ordered the execution of the son of an Italian crime boss. We don’t know much about the young man, who’s doing a six month sentence for unspecified crimes, other than that he’s not very bright. When a group of Mexican prisoners tell him that La Eme and his father’s organization has come to amicable terms and invite him to a “party” he readily agrees.

What follows is clearly based on the famous contrapuntal sequence in The Godfather where Michael Corleone attends the christening of his sister Connie’s son while his lieutenants murder his rivals. The young Italian gets high with his new Mexican friends. As Santana and Julie make love, the Mexicans beat up then rape the Italian. Soon, Santana and Julie aren’t making love. Not only has Monoya Santana never had heterosexual sex. He’s never had consensual sex. He penetrates her. She screams for him to stop. He doesn’t. We cut back to Folsom prison. We cut back to Julie’s apartment. We cut back to Folsom prison. Finally Santana seems to find something inside of him that’s able to pull back from the abyss. He pulls out of Julie and climbs off her. The Italian in Folsom isn’t so lucky. The Mexicans ram a huge serrated blade up his ass, and he dies. Santana pays no price for the murder, but Julie does. The Italian crime lord, distraught over the loss of his son, takes revenge by releasing pure, uncut heroin onto the streets of East LA, a move guaranteed to kill Mexicans, but no Italians. Julie’s younger brother dies the next day of a drug overdose.

American Me never turns into a feminist parable where the love of a good woman helps a sinful man turn his life around. For Julie, Montoya Santana is two men, the naive 40-old-teenager she teaches to drive and takes for his first long walk along the beach, and the murderer and drug dealer ultimately responsible for her brother’s death. Santana has spent so much time in jail it has transformed his consciousness. I can have anything I want inside, he tells her, not even aware that there are simple things, like walking along the beach, that even being the biggest swinging dick on the inside won’t let you have. Earlier, after we saw him threaten a shoe store clerk for being disrespectful, and she scolded him that the man was only doing his job, you get the sense that yes, that’s what she thinks he should do. He should turn his life around. But it’s too late for Montoya Santana. Women, and the heterosexual world, have always been a far off, unattainable ideal. Julie is only a brief glimpse of the life he could have had outside the prison industrial complex. On their next date, he gets rearrested on a petty drug charge, and put away for good.

If the Olmos lacks the skill of a Martin Scorsese to flesh out anybody but his major characters — it’s a little difficult sometimes to know who is who — it’s more than made up for by his prophetic, morally uncompromising vision. For a Mexican American, the United States is a prison. Inside, outside, it’s all the same. We are a Darwinian society that corrupts masculinity, pits black against white, white against Mexican, Mexican against everybody, and destroys us body and soul. Entire generations are cut off from women, from honest work, from the possibility of ever having a family or a decent life. Montoya Santana was doomed even before he was born. He’s a “rape baby,” conceived during the “Zoot Suit Riots” in the 1940s when some white sailors beat up his father, held down his mother, and gang raped her. His father has always resented him.

As a teenager, Santana joins a gang, gets arrested for a minor breaking and entering charge, and sent to juvenile detention. For Edward James Olmos, rape isn’t just a problem, it’s the very spiritual foundation of the prison industrial complex. One night Santana, who expects to get out by his 18th birthday, is held at knife point, anally raped, and kills his attacker. This could have been the basis for a entire movie. What’s the morality behind a man killing his rapist? But Olmos never entertains the naively optimistic idea that you can stop rape in prison without tearing down the prisons. Santana is sent away on a 20-year-sentence that has the force of inevitability. Montoya Santana never really had the choice. Conservatives and people who talk about “personal responsibility” might dispute the film’s fatalistic assumptions. But, once out of juvenile detention and up at Folsom, Santana proves himself to be a capable man. He probably would have succeeded in civilian life if the socioeconomic odds had not been so completely stacked against him. He, JD, a white friend, Mundo, another Mexican, and a calm but brutally efficient enforcer nicknamed El Japo, quickly gain control of Folsom, and establish a thriving drug trade that gives them influence that extends far beyond the prison’s walls.

“I could run things from solitary,” Santana boasts in the voice over narration.

If Santana seems unable to cope in the civilian world that’s only because, Olmos suggests, the outside world is a foreign country. Santana becomes, in effect, the head of a Chicano state within the prison industrial complex. It’s a harsh, Darwinian state where rape is used as social control, people get hooked on smuggled drugs, and where senior members of La Ema can order an execution with a nod or a tap on the shoulder. But, as Santana later tells Julie, it was better than what came before it, a Hobbesian state of nature where, “if someone wanted your cigarettes or your manhood and he was stronger than you he just took it.” Santana maintains that he thought of La Ema as a foundation for a Chicano revolutionary movement. He read books. He studied politics. He prepared himself as a legitimate political leader. For all we know, he’s telling the truth. But he’s also living a dream that will never happen. After he’s put away the second time, Santana runs up against La Ema’s own code of justice, its brutal dictate that any member who weakens the organization will pay with his life. This is, of course, the nature of a secret society. Revolutionary groups routinely enforce a rough code of justice on their own members. Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film about the French Resistance, Army of Shadows, show us exactly that. But Olmos is a harsher, more uncompromising moralist than Melville is. Indeed, he harkens back to the spare Puritanism of William A. Wellman and films like The Public Enemy. Criminals don’t become revolutionaries. They live and die as criminals, their manhood violated, their morals corrupted, their bodies consumed.

Montoya Santana has only two options, an honorable death now, or a dishonorable one later. Like a Chicano Christ, he makes the right choice, but it’s doubtful that, by doing so, he saved anybody’s soul. American Me is one of the darkest, most unsparing visions of the dark underbelly of American capitalism ever put to film.