A lost man

Since Luis Valdez’s I Am Joaquin (1969)—widely identified as the “first” Chicano film—the notion of a Chicano cinema has been framed within the political discourse of the Chicano civil rights movement. ¹ As such, in the 1970s, filmmakers and collectives worked within a binarism of reform and revolution: on the one hand advocating for access to U.S. television stations and film studios, and on the other hand theorizing their work as the “northernmost expression” of New Latin American Cinema. ² In the same period, however, a different type of Chicano film practice was taking shape that neither sought access to the industry (reform) nor rooted itself in a radical national politics (revolution). Instead, these filmmakers produced low-budget films drawn from personal or local experience and situated within the context of the American avant-garde or “underground” film. Although this body of work is not as well known as the rights-and identity-based genre of “Chicano cinema,” it is also much larger, affording an opportunity to examine Chicano authorship as an aesthetic or text-producing phenomenon with critical mass, rather than as a structured absence within 194the film and television industry. ³ Even so, some of the same exclusions are at work, albeit within a noncommercial framework.