MotherJones MA93: American she.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A year after the L.A. riots, it’s Hollywood, not the fourth estate, that continues to reveal why “people go crazy and burn down their neighborhoods,” says Allison Anders, director of last year’s low- budget hit, Gas Food Lodging. As proof, Anders offers her new film, Mi Vida Loca (due out this summer), which gives a voice to yet another segment of society usually ignored: the “homegirls” of L.A.’s Echo Park gang. Unlike the media stereotype, these women are independent, strong-willed, and hardly content to stand in men’s shadows. “Feminism has definitely reached these girls,” Anders says. “They don’t have the opportunities to back up their self-determination. So they express it in terms of gangs–or crime.” Seventeen-year-old Nelida Lopez (in the red shirt), who plays a character named Whisper, makes no apologies. “Everybody has a life,” she says, “and this is the life we chose.” Loca may be an unlikely story of women’s empowerment, but Anders, a single mother who lived in Echo Park for six years, still believes that “movies can tell us about our place, or lack of place, in our culture.”

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate