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Composing Identities: Films, Families and Racism

Abstract With this paper, I elaborate the use of the movies American History X and Mi Familia in classroom settings to highlight issues of ethnicity and the social construction of identity through families and communities. Taken together, these movies draw attention to racial geographies of Los Angeles but in very different ways. I contrast the ways they involve familial reactions to geographies of exclusion and betrayal, and how racial space is structured through larger community and institutional relations. I speak to how these issues are broached in a large introductory, interdisciplinary class.