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?

The movie, Mosquita y Mari, is a coming of age story about two teenage girls who are in the process of finding themselves and discovering who they truly are. Throughout the movie we see them struggling through the tough adolescent years together and grappling with their identities and their relationship with each other. There is a lot of character growth throughout the movie, and we see many scenes during which the directors hint that there is more than just a friendship between them. One of the scenes towards the beginning of the movie that struck me was the scene in which they share an ice cream cone. Sharing food (especially something like an ice cream cone which you would both have to lick) is something that you would only do with someone that you shared a certain level of intimacy with. At this point in the movie, they don’t know each other very well, and I felt that there was clear foreshadowing that something further was going to develop in their relationship later on in the movie. The director could have chosen many different foods or meals for them to share but they chose an ice cream cone which meant that the scene had an intense focus on tongues. Tongues and licking in particular are things that can be seen in a sexual nature which added another layer of intimacy to the scene and made the audience really consider what their relationship was going to turn into it. Even the way the scene was shot leant itself to establishing an intimate connection and bond with the audience and characters and between Mosquita y Mari. There were a lot of close-up shots, which allowed for the audience to see the emotion conveyed by the characters and emphasizes the closeness and bond that the characters are forming. It allows for the viewer to be drawn into the subject’s personal space and share their feelings. While in the movie, the words lesbian/queer are never explicitly said and the girls never engage in any explicitly sexual activities, we clearly see a lesbian relationship portrayed on screen. The ways in which the directors structured the scenes and the entirety of the movie itself allowed for the audience to see the development of this lesbian relationship and the character growth that both girls experienced.

Venecia y Fanessa 

Great talent and minds

July 2015

by Elizabeth Flores-Arroyo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanessa-erazo/aurora-guerrero-on-making_b_3226548.html