“Mosquita y Mari,” Aurora Guerrero
Around thirty-three minutes into Mosquita y Mari, the viewer witnesses an intimate and formative moment for Yolanda in which she experiments casually with gender while bobbing along to music from Mari’s CD player and staring at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. Wearing her father’s hat, Yoli smiles at herself while dancing in the mirror; in this scene, the viewer is exposed to Yoli’s bubbling curiosity and excitement, her giddiness and genuine vulnerability that stems from her burgeoning feelings for her best friend Mari. The close-up shot is incredibly valuable here as one can see the earnestness in Yoli’s eyes and budding confidence in her ever-widening smile in addition to the embarrassment that spreads across her face when her mother walks into the room. When her mother says “You went into your father’s closet” as she notices Yoli’s hat, Yoli says nothing but takes the hat off and sets it on the dresser as if preparing to be scolded and shamed for crossing that gender line. Instead, her mother starts to dance with her and Yolanda places her father’s hat on her mother as they dance together with matching grins. This scene is important for a number of reasons, but its most critical value comes from its positive representation of experimenting with queerness at a young age and the scene’s depiction of a non-heteronormative teenage girl feeling good about herself for embodying her queerness. Yolanda’s initial self-consciousness when her mother first walks into the room does not take away from this representation either; it is a common reaction many questioning and queer youth can likely relate to, particularly for those with conservative cultural backgrounds and families who have been conditioned to expect backlash for nonconformity, and it accurately conveys the internal conflict many queer youth report struggling with as they weigh the costs and benefits of queer self-expression. This scene acknowledges that getting in touch with one’s queerness can be scary, relieving, terrifying, and terrific all at once. The underlying message ultimately suggests that living authentically is the key to happiness, that— whether it takes the form of dancing with a man’s hat on in private or coming out to one’s entire family— being true to one’s innate queerness can be both liberating and exhilarating, and that people’s reactions may not always be what one expects. After Yoli and her mother finish dancing, however, Yoli’s mother’s demeanor changes swiftly. She focuses on her own reflection in the mirror, stops dancing, takes off the hat and tells Yoli to put it back, and shuts her daughter down when she asks how her and Yoli’s father met. The question is, is this because she realizes that there is something queer about Yoli’s newfound interest in romance and men’s hats, or is it simply because she doesn’t want her daughter to be distracted by any romance and is oblivious to the potential queerness of the situation?
- Avery
